Farming hasn’t been easy this year. The highly anticipated Pro Farmer Crop Tour wrapped up in late August with the conclusion that yields will likely fall below USDA estimates this year. Corn could be down sharply, estimated by Pro Farmer to average 168.1 bushels per acre across the country, compared to USDA’s August estimate of 175.4 bushels per acre. The cause is no surprise: Prolonged heat and drought conditions in much of the West will drag the national average this year. “The question heading into Crop Tour was whether there would be enough bushels in the eastern Corn Belt to offset the bushels lost in the drier western areas,” said Brian Grete, Pro Farmer editor. “After Crop Tour, the answer is: Clearly, there won’t be enough in the east to offset the west, not nearly enough.” Although this national balancing act of offsetting production in the east and west is an annual ritual, this year’s weather conditions were more severe in the West, and dry conditions stretched farther east than typical. The eastern Corn Belt wasn’t unscathed, either. In central Iowa, “The crop looked good but once the samples were pulled, it wasn’t what it appeared ... just poor grain length due to the lack of rain and excessive heat at the wrong times,” Grete said. Last week, I spent some time on farms in Arkansas, where we worked with USDA-NRCS to capture stories about farmers who are adding safeguards to their land. Many of the practices were implemented to manage the growing conditions that farmers say are becoming hotter, drier and longer in duration than previous generations have experienced. As in much of the country, water in Arkansas is increasingly scarce as aquifers fall below historic levels. On many of the rice farms I visited, retention ponds are replacing ground water with surface-water irrigation. For some farmers, cover crops have become a standard practice to increase infiltration and capture what little water resources are available during critical growing periods. Farmers there understand that their operations must change to make the most of their resources and to manage the inherent risk that farmers face today with weather that is less predictable and more severe. They’re proactively changing the way their families had farmed for many generations before them. In doing so, they’re insulating their operations from the yield variability and crop quality on which their profitability hinges. We’ll publish more about these Arkansas farmers in the months to come. In the meantime, one of our stories this week features two Conservation Steward farmers who are part of America's Conservation Ag Movement (ACAM). They appeared recently on AgriTalk radio. During the show, Nebraska farmer Hank McGowan details just how much the weather impacted his growing season in central Nebraska and how he manages water resources to return problem acres to productivity. Indiana farmer Aaron Kruger talks about how his no-till and cover crop practices are helping to weatherproof his soils from wind and water erosion and mitigate the abiotic stresses that crops experienced this year. Hint: His year-over-year dryland yields are improving. Enjoy,
David Frabotta
Manager, Climate-Smart Interactive Programming, Trust In Food™ | 