Drought now grips more than half of the nation

Boats sit on the dry, cracked bot­tom in a dry cove at Morse Reser­voir in Noblesville, Ind., Mon­day. The reser­voir is down nearly 6 feet from nor­mal lev­els and being low­ered 1 foot every five days to pro­vide water for Indi­anapo­lis. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

JIM SUHR, STEVE KARNOWSKI

Asso­ci­ated Press

WALTONVILLE, Ill. — The nation’s widest drought in decades is spread­ing, with more than half of the con­ti­nen­tal United States now in some stage of drought and most of the rest endur­ing abnor­mally dry conditions.

Only in the 1930s and the 1950s has a drought cov­ered more land, accord­ing to fed­eral fig­ures released Mon­day. So far, there’s lit­tle risk of a Dust Bowl-type cat­a­stro­phe, but crop losses could mount if rain doesn’t come soon.

In its monthly drought report, the National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter in Asheville, N.C., announced that 55 per­cent of the coun­try was in a mod­er­ate to extreme drought at the end of June. The parched con­di­tions expanded last month in the West, the Great Plains and the Mid­west, fueled by the 14th warmest and 10th dri­est June on record, the report said.

Top­soil has turned dry while “crops, pas­tures and range­land have dete­ri­o­rated at a rate rarely seen in the last 18 years,” the report said.

The per­cent­age of affected land is the largest since Decem­ber 1956, when 58 per­cent of the coun­try was cov­ered by drought, and it rivals even some years in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, though experts point out that this year’s weather has been milder than that period, and farm­ing prac­tices have been vastly improved since then.

In south­ern Illi­nois, Kenny Brum­mer has lost 800 acres of corn that he grows to feed his 400 head of cat­tle and 30,000 hogs. Now he’s scram­bling to find hun­dreds of thou­sands of bushels of replace­ment feed.

“Where am I going to get that from? You have con­cerns about it every morn­ing when you wake up,” said Brum­mer, who farms near Wal­tonville. “The drought is bad, but that’s just half of the prob­lem on this farm.”

Around a third of the nation’s corn crop has been hurt, with some of it so badly dam­aged that farm­ers have already cut down their with­ered plants to feed to cat­tle. As of Sun­day, the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture said, 38 per­cent of the corn crop was in poor or very poor con­di­tion, com­pared with 30 per­cent a week earlier.

“This is def­i­nitely the epi­cen­ter — right in the heart of the Mid­west,” said cli­ma­tol­o­gist Mark Svo­boda with the Nebraska-based National Drought Mit­i­ga­tion Center.

It’s all a huge come­down for farm­ers who had expected a record year when they sowed 96.4 mil­lion acres in corn, the most since 1937. The Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture ini­tially pre­dicted national aver­age corn yields of 166 bushels per acre this year.

The agency has revised that pro­jec­tion down to 146, and more reduc­tions are pos­si­ble if con­di­tions don’t improve.

The lower pro­jec­tion is still an improve­ment over the aver­age yields of around 129 bushels a decade ago. But already tight sup­plies and fears that the drought will get worse before it gets bet­ter have been push­ing up grain prices, which are likely to trans­late into higher food prices for con­sumers, par­tic­u­larly for meat and poultry.

Monday’s report was based on data going back to 1895 called the Palmer Drought Index. It feeds into the widely watched and more detailed U.S. Drought Mon­i­tor, which reported last week that 61 per­cent of the con­ti­nen­tal U.S. was in a mod­er­ate to excep­tional drought. How­ever, the weekly Drought Mon­i­tor goes back only 12 years, so cli­ma­tol­o­gists use the Palmer Drought Index for com­par­ing droughts before 2000.

Cli­ma­tol­o­gists have labeled this year’s dry spell a “flash drought” because it devel­oped in a mat­ter of months, not over mul­ti­ple sea­sons or years.

The cur­rent drought is sim­i­lar to the droughts of the 1950s, which weren’t as intense as those of the 1930s, said Jake Crouch, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist with the National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter. And farm­ing has changed a lot since the Dust Bowl era. Bet­ter soil con­ser­va­tion has reduced ero­sion, and mod­ern hybrids are much more resis­tant to drought.

But Crouch said it’s impor­tant to under­stand that this drought is still unfolding.

“We can’t say with cer­tainty how long this might last now. Now that we’re going up against the two largest droughts in his­tory, that’s some­thing to be wary of,” Crouch said. “The com­ing months are really going to be the deter­min­ing fac­tor of how big a drought it ends up being.”

In north­west Kansas, Brian Baalman’s cat­tle pas­tures have dried up, along with prob­a­bly half of his corn crop. He des­per­ately needs some rain to save the rest of it, and he’s wor­ried what will hap­pen if the drought lingers into next year.

“I have never seen this type of weather before like this. A lot of old timers haven’t either,” Baal­man said. “I just think we are see­ing his­tory in the making.”

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is already mov­ing to help farm­ers and ranchers.

Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack last week announced plans for stream­lin­ing the aid process. A major goal is to cut the time it takes to declare an agri­cul­tural dis­as­ter area. He also reduced inter­est rates for emer­gency loans and made it cheaper for farm­ers to graze live­stock or cut hay on lands oth­er­wise locked up in a con­ver­sa­tion program.

Some state gov­ern­ments are step­ping in, too. In Wis­con­sin, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emer­gency in 42 coun­ties last week to speed up the issuance of per­mits for tem­porar­ily using stream or lake water for irrigation.

Dur­ing a visit Mon­day to a south­ern Illi­nois corn and soy­bean farm, Illi­nois Gov. Pat Quinn announced that drought-affected farm­ers would be eli­gi­ble for state debt restruc­tur­ing and loan pro­grams in addi­tion to the aid the USDA announced last week.

Quinn ven­tured into a corn field where he spent some time look­ing for an actual ear of corn. When he found one and peeled off the husk, there were no kernels.

Two-thirds of Illi­nois is in what’s clas­si­fied as a severe drought or worse. Neigh­bor­ing Indi­ana is even worse, with 70 per­cent in at least a severe drought.

Brum­mer could nor­mally count on corn yields of 170 bushels per acre. He expects to get just 10 bushels this year, if he gets any­thing at all.

The top of the corn­stalks are an unhealthy pale green, he said. Many of them have no ears, and “if there are there are a few ker­nels, they don’t seem to know if they should die or make a grain.”

Crop insur­ance will cover up to 150 bushels per acre. But no cov­er­age is avail­able for Brummer’s live­stock, so he fig­ures he’ll lose $350,000 to $400,000 on that side of the operation.

Not long ago, Brum­mer rejoiced along with count­less other Mid­west grow­ers about get­ting their crops in the ground early.

“It looked really good until about a month ago,” he said. “Then the con­cerns started, and it’s been down­hill ever since.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.