Wettest year EVER.
“You hear words like biblical, unprecedented,” said Sherman Newlin, a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois. The planting season has been “a disaster.”
Newlin said he has been rained out most days since he started planting on May 17. He did manage to sow corn on about 60% of his acreage, but standing water and muddy fields likely will drag down yields.
Never a spring planting season like this one
The 12 months that ended with April were the wettest ever for the contiguous U.S. Rivers topped their banks. Levees breached. Fields filled with water and mud. And it kept on raining.
Corn plantings are further behind schedule for this time of year than they have been in records dating to 1980.
Analysts are predicting an unheard-of 6 million acres intended for the grain may simply go unsown this year.
“Every farmer that I talk to says, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said Tom Sleight, CEO of the U.S. Grains Council, a trade group.
See slideshow showing Midwest flooding earlier this year:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2019-03-23/midwest-submerged-in-floodwaters-following-winter-stormfloodwaters-following-winter-storm
Thanks to Laurel for this link
“But what is produced in better areas should bring reasonable prices as totals grown drop,” says Laurel. “And trump mandated more ethanol, which seeing as it’s gmo crap is prob the best use of the muck. ”God help the cows n pigs getting the stover n ethanol waste though.”
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June 3, 2019 at 06:25PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
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