Record rains threaten Midwest crop yields
INDIANAPOLIS – Weeks of record rainfalls drenched Don Lamb’s cornfields this summer, drowning some plants and leaving others yellowed, 2 feet tall and capable of producing little, if any, grain.
The 48-year-old central Indiana farmer can’t recall anything like the deluges he’s seen this summer from late May on; the latest was a 4-inch downpour a week ago. Neither can his father, who’s been farming for 50 years.
“I always try to stay optimistic about crops, but this is a year where it’s been really tough to be optimistic,” said Lamb, who began farming in 1989 near Lebanon, Indiana.
It’s a scene playing out in Illinois and Indiana, both of which set rainfall records for June, and four other key farm states. Climatologists are assessing what brought on the repeated precipitation, keeping corn and soybean fields from drying out and setting the stage for big crop losses in several states just a year after record harvests. Those losses and their impact on crop prices are expected to be offset by bountiful harvests in the western cornbelt states of Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
The Midwestern Regional Climate Center in Champaign, Illinois, is looking into the causes of the rain-sodden summer – Illinois saw twice the normal amount of rain for the month of June alone – including whether the largest El Nino system in a decade or climate change played a role.
A stationary front that stalled over the region in late spring funneled in the parade of drenching low-pressure systems that swept the region throughout June and into July, said Bryan Peake, one of the center’s climatologists.
“Some stations were getting 3 or 4 inches in a day, and some were all the way up to 6 or 7 inches in extreme cases, just really astonishing amounts,” he said.
East-central Illinois farmer Mark Henrichs isn’t sure whether the crippling rains, which came three years after a devastating drought, might be tied to changes climate scientists have predicted global warming might bring. But the 58-year-old knows they were highly unusual.
“When you shatter rainfall records that have existed for over 100 years, it does make you wonder,” said Henrichs, who has farmed for 40 years near Chatsworth, Illinois.
The first clear assessment of the extent of Midwest crop losses will come Aug. 12, when the USDA releases its first harvest estimates. But Chris Hurt, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, expects it won’t be until October that a truly accurate estimate emerges because of the many remaining variables, including warmer, drier weather in the forecast for August.