Worst Midwest Drought in Years
By Scott Kilman, Wall Street Journal
We're getting to the point where the plants don't have much flowers left. It's not good news.” – Agronomist Bill Wiebold
The
worst drought across the east-central United States since 1988 is
shrinking potential harvests of corn and soybeans, and slowing
commercial shipping on some rivers.
The dry
spell, now in its fifth month, is blistering productive farmland and
draining tributaries that feed the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
Those are crucial pathways for hauling commodities such as salt,
petroleum products and cement-making materials to Midwest cities….
So far,
the economic fallout from the prolonged drought isn't as broad as the
impact of the 1988 dry spell, which shrank the U.S. corn harvest by 31
percent and sped the consolidation of American farms. The swath of
affected land this time is much narrower than it was 17 years ago.
Moreover,
the economic damage from the drought is being partly offset by a marked
easing of a drought across the northern Plains that baked farms and
ranches for more than five years. Most economists, for example, expect
the rate of overall food inflation to cool this year, largely because
of weakening cattle prices.
The
Midwest state hardest hit by the drought has been Illinois, typically
the nation's biggest producer of soybeans and the second-largest
producer of corn, behind Iowa.
According
to state authorities, tens of thousands of Illinois farmers already
have lost one-third of their potential crops, which is worrying
merchants in farm towns across the state. A survey by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture found that 55 percent of the Illinois corn
crop was in very poor or poor condition last week, as well as 34
percent of the soybean crop and 74 percent of Illinois pastures….
Production
of corn nationwide should fall 16 percent this year, to 9.9 billion
bushels from last year's record harvest of 11.8 billion bushels, mostly
because of drought damage in Illinois, eastern Iowa and Missouri, said
Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co., a commodity forecasting concern
in Chicago.
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