Midwest crops falter in record rain

Associated Press

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 from late May on this summer; 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, Ind.

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, Ill., is looking into the causes of the rain-sodden summer – Illinois saw twice the normal amount of rain for 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.

Indiana has seen the worst of it, said Chris Hurt, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. A quarter of its corn crop is listed as “poor” or “very poor,” and Hurt predicts $500 million in corn and soybean crop losses.

Elsewhere, “poor” or “very poor” corn crop conditions are being seen in a fifth of Ohio’s crop, 18 percent in Missouri, 15 percent in Illinois and about one-tenth in Kansas and Michigan.