Eric Snodgrass said harvest is getting squeezed as the Eastern Corn Belt stays soaked and the Southern Plains stay locked in extreme heat. He said the weather pattern is now colliding with the part of the season when farmers need fields to carry equipment and grain to move.
Abilene, Texas, set a new record this week for the most consecutive 100-plus-degree days at 31. In the Eastern Corn Belt, widespread areas picked up more than a foot of rain in August alone, while some parts of Illinois, Indiana and eastern Iowa had already logged over a foot of rain in June.
Eastern Corn Belt fields
Snodgrass said climate reporting districts across parts of the Central and Eastern Corn Belt are showing some of the wettest conditions ever recorded for a growing season since May. He described the span this way: "When you just examine the statistics for this growing season, starting in May and going all the way till now, these climate reporting districts across parts of the Central and Eastern Corn Belt are showing some of the wettest conditions we’ve ever had for a growing season."
Scouts working the Pro Farmer Crop Tour last week found crown rot, weak stands and signs of nitrogen loss in fields. Farmers in the Eastern Corn Belt now face a narrower window to get across saturated ground before harvest slips deeper into the season.
Southern Plains heat
At the same time, some areas across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and the lower Mississippi River Valley have not measured any rain in a month. Those same areas have baked under daily highs of 105 to 110 degrees, and one Oklahoma grower told Snodgrass he is considering relocating his farming operation because of how routinely extreme the heat has become. A report on harvest losses at Bemborough Farm showed the kind of pressure that prolonged heat can put on field work.
The Atlantic hurricane season has been unusually quiet even as the Pacific has had three powerhouse cyclones at once. Snodgrass said the Atlantic season is running well below average and expects it to finish at roughly half of normal activity, while Hurricanes Lowell and Karina and Tropical Storm Marie were feeding off bathtub-warm ocean waters in the Central and Eastern Pacific and Marie was on the verge of becoming a hurricane.
Tropical Storm Dolly is spinning up in the open Atlantic and could bring beneficial rain to Puerto Rico. For growers in the Eastern Corn Belt and the Southern Plains, the immediate problem is not a single storm but a shrinking harvest window on one side and continuing heat stress on the other.
