Farm Weather Update For Mid-october

Mother Nature has been delivering a beating this week, but seems to be heading into more moderate weather in the upcoming weeks:

• South Carolina Faces Catastrophic Flooding It’s common knowledge in farming that it doesn’t rain when you want it to and it always rains when you don’t need it. There’s no place in our country this is more true than South Carolina. After facing a summer of abnormally dry to severe drought conditions, Hurricane Joaquin has turned the tables on the Palmetto State, drenching it with over 20″ of rainfall and causing significant flooding damage. Thousands of acres of vegetable and row crops have been flooded in what the Weather Channel has dubbed, “one of the most prolific rainfall events in modern U.S. history.” With only 13% of the state’s cotton and peanut crops out of the field, Clemson University has held an event to help farmers learn to manage the flooded crops and mitigate the effects.
• Texas Drought Continues as Kansas Dries Up. In drought news, since the end of the long-term drought in the south and Texas with the record rains in May and June, the unusually dry summer has dropped under two inches of moisture on the southern Midwest, the Lone Star state and the western states in the South. Much of central and eastern Texas has degraded back into a drought cycle, with the drought in Kansas spreading further. There was also degradation of drought conditions across most of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. It’s hoped that the predicted rains this week will help alleviate the problem.
• Surprising El Nino Projections Could Save Commodities. Though people usually equate El Nino to unpredictable heavy rains and severe drought, creating poor agricultural output, economists with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have reached a different conclusion. A recently released a new paper from three economists makes a strong connection between El Nino and increased inflation and gross domestic product (GDP). How? Droughts and floods require more electricity to pump water where it needs to go, boosting the utility’s income and the cost of coal and petroleum products to produce additional energy, increasing inflation and GDP. When crop production falters in these types of conditions, prices soar, providing another source of inflation and higher GDP as food prices rise.
• Crop Production Reports In. As the harvest keeps on rolling, numbers are starting to roll in on this year’s crops. Soybeans had a slightly lower area planted, yield and total production compared to last year, but not markedly so. Corn is still behind the five-year average on maturation, but is still significantly better than last year at this time with 86% of corn mature and 27% harvested. Sorghum has done well this year, currently 11 percentage points above last year and 12%% higher than the five-year average at 77% harvested. The barley season is all but wrapped up with over 95% of the grain harvested over two weeks ahead of the five-year average.

Where is the weather going next? Check back soon to find out.