PLAINS, Pa. — It's a pleasant day at the farm store and greenhouses at Omalia's in Plain's Township, but if you venture through the woods and over the railroad tracks out to the fields, it's a different story, as pickers work hard to harvest as much as possible before the remnants of Ida bring heavy rain here.
"You're faced with two options when a scenario is presented to you," explained owner Larry Omalia. "You can either sit back and just wait and see how it turns out, but if you react too late, it's usually too late to do anything of any consequence. So you make a decision. Go out there, make a difference, pick what we can. If it was all for naught, we still have a good product to sell."
Workers are trying to pick as many beets as possible. Then, they'll move on to pepper, corn, and bean fields here.
Although this farmland sits next to the river, it's not the river levels Larry Omalia is concerned about.
"Because we really think if we get five to six inches of rain. It's quite clear this low-lying area could end up being nothing but a massive puddle, not even being influenced by the river directly," he added.
In the middle of a bean field on Omalia's farm, you can see there's a circle with brown dead plant matter. Omalia says this is all because of a puddle from heavy rainfall, and he's nervous that a lot of his farm will end up looking like that after the next couple of days.
"It's really a little more insult to injury. We've already been hurt a little bit, and having that much rain was the last thing that I was wishing or hoping for," he said.
Depending on how much rain Plains Township gets, Omalia says it could be days before he can even drive out to his fields because of flooding.
While he's hoping to continue to harvest until early November, he's not sure if that's going to be possible. So he and his team members are doing everything they can to save as much as possible.