The region's farmers are spending long hours on their tractors, planting crops in a race against time and the ever-present threat of harsh weather.

"It's been going real well," Clay County farmer Mark Nyquist said Wednesday. "We're creeping up on the halfway mark."

Favorable weather and good soil conditions have area farmers well ahead in planting their crops.

"When they can go, they go," said Joel Ransom, an extension agronomist at North Dakota State University.

North Dakota, farmers have sown 30 percent of the spring wheat crop - 13 percent more than the five-year average, according to a report issued by the state's Agricultural Statistics Service.

The state's farmers also have planted 22 percent of this year's expected barley acreage and 11 percent of the corn, the report shows.

Corn and soybean plantings will pick up after the first week of May, when daily temperatures are less likely to drop below the freezing mark, Ransom said.

Recent rains have slowed field work in central and southern Minnesota. On average, the state's farmers have planted about 14 percent of their spring wheat and 11 percent of their corn, according to the Minnesota Agricultural Statistics Service.

The nearly 3,000 shareholders in Moorhead-based American Crystal Sugar Co. have planted about 232,000 acres of beets - 46 percent of the 500,000 acres set aside for this year's crop, company spokesman Jeff Schweitzer said.

In the southern Red River Valley, the 500 farmers who own Wahpeton, N.D.-based Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative have planted about 40 percent of this year's acreage. Minn-Dak shareholders intend to plant 104,000 acres, co-op spokeswoman Susan Johnson said.

"In some areas in the south it has been too wet," Johnson said. "Some growers I don't think have turned a wheel."

Some early planted beets have emerged from the soil, but growers haven't reported any frost damage, Schweitzer and Johnson said.

Nyquist said he has seeded 600 acres of sugar beets and about 1,500 acres of wheat, with only one short rain delay.

Barring more rain, Nyquist said he and his farm help should finish planting those crops this weekend, and then gear up to seed soybeans.

"You can get in a lot of acres if you can keep the planters rolling" he said. "It's just a matter of being able to stay in the field."

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