It’s the wettest planting season American farmers can remember – And the flood season isn’t coming close to an end with Colorado’s snowpack being 437% of normal

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There has never been a spring planting season like this one. Rivers topped their banks. Levees were breached. Fields filled with water and mud. And it kept raining.

You hear words like biblical, unprecedented,” said Sherman Newlin, a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois. “That’s all true.

us flooding crisis economic collapse
Water floods a cornfield in Malden, Illinois, U.S., on May 29. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

It was raining when U.S. farmers, a year into being squeezed out of the world’s largest soybean market by the trade war with China, were supposed to start putting down crops. It was raining when President Donald Trump risked starting a feud with Mexico, the biggest buyer of U.S. corn, by threatening to slap tariffs on its exports.

The storms and rains may soon lift, but the layers of uncertainty just keep adding up.

Farmers who have lost access to Chinese soy buyers don’t see relief on the horizon. Other countries may chip away at corn exports. With Brazil reaping a bumper crop while U.S. farmers watched the weather, buyers in Asia were shopping for South American grain.

Now there are the fears about Mexico, which bought about $5.5 billion in U.S. grain and soy shipments last year. Tariffs could also upend ratification of the new trade agreement between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, said Beth Ford, chief executive officer of Land O’Lakes Inc. “Stress is at a tipping point for many in farm country,” she said. “The last thing they need right now is more uncertainty.

The National Grain and Feed Association agreed, saying in a statement that the duties “unquestionably will jeopardize” the accord.

It is fair to say that there has never been a geopolitical situation in modern times like the one we have right now,” Matt Campbell, a risk management consultant at INTL FCStone, said in an email.

The wettest year in contiguous US

There has never been weather like this, either. The 12 months that ended with April were the wettest ever for the contiguous U.S. That spurred other firsts: Corn plantings are further behind schedule for this time of year than they have been in records dating to 1980 and 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,’ and these are not 20-year-olds,” said Tom Sleight, CEO of the U.S. Grains Council, a trade group.

Business collapse, Prices soaring

Ripple effects are already hitting businesses reliant on grains, especially corn, the most widely grown U.S. crop.

Amid the deluge, prices slumped for cattle heading to feedlots to bulk up on corn, which surged 18% in May, the most in a month since 2015. And the grain rally sent shares tumbling for Tyson Foods Inc. and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., whose chickens feed on corn.

Meanwhile, demand for fertilizer and other crop chemicals has been slammed. Hedge funds who had made massive bets that corn prices would decline drastically cut those positions this week, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday.

Even if the heavy rains do break, as forecast, through June 10, it may be too late for some.

In Keota, Iowa, Lindsay Greiner sowed his 700 acres of corn toward the end of April – and then wasn’t able to get into his soaked fields for five weeks. He’s expecting much lower yields this year than last.

The crop right now is yellow. “It should be green,” he said. “It looks so bad.

In Illinois, Newlin, whose farm is about a four-hour drive south of Chicago, said he has been rained out most days since he started planting on May 17. He did manage to sow about 60% of the 1,000 acres where he wanted to put down corn, but standing water and muddy conditions in those fields likely will drag down yields.

His crop insurance coverage will begin to decline after June 5. Generally, insurance claims for crops that can’t be planted pay out at less than half of the value of what would have been the harvest. The $16 billion in farm aid that Trump has promised to help farmers won’t be of any help, as it’s now framed, to anyone who can’t get seeds into the ground.

Disaster

Newlin called the planting season “a disaster.

Anything in our area that had been planted looks like junk,” he said. “The weather just won’t give you a break.

Colorado’s snowpack out of the norm

In Colorado, the statewide snowpack is 437% of normal, with highs peaking at 768% in the San Juan Mountains, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. A good thing for skiing and drought conditions…

June 1 snowpack map

But heading into summer, the snowpack is likely to result in some flooding, according to the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which released a report this week on the outlook for snowmelt flood conditions.

When we talk about snowpack, the snow water equivalent, or SWE, is the key figure to keep in mind. The SWE is the amount of water contained within the snowpack, or the depth of water that would result if all of the snow was melted at once.

Flooding isn’t finished yet. There’s still a lot of snow around. Many farming businesses will disappear. Our grocery stores’s prices will soar.

[Bloomberg, TheDenverChannel]

3 Comments

  1. OBVIOUSLY ,no one cares about the US AIR FORCE WEATHER MACHINE THATS CAUSING THIS BAD WEATHER,you can watch it in action on the NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MOSAIC in looping mode,watch as the air force steers the storm clouds over the midwest,they start every night after sun down,THIS WILL END BADLY IF THEIR NOT STOPPED,starving people won’t watch their FIVE YEAR OLD DIE OF STARVATION…you cowards had better stand up soon..OR YOU WILL BE FIGHTING THEM…

  2. Colorado’s snow pack is NOT “437% of normal”, for some areas are 437% greater than this same time last year. Last year was a drought winter with a warm spring melting the snow pack earlier in the year, so for this same date and due to a longer and colder time-frame, the snow pack has remained deeper than last year’s time-frame.

    I live in the mountains, and our overall snow pack was only 150% of the last ten year mean average.

    J Gibbs, PhD

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