How farmers will adapt to the prospect of a new, soggier normal

Brent Cunningham

American farmers, having endured the wettest 12 months in well over a hundred years and facing predictions that this could be the soggy new normal for the nation’s midsection, are looking at a variety of ways to speed up their processes next year, according to Bloomberg.

“The plans include bigger and faster tractors to speed up planting, quick-growing seeds, and more extensive use of cover crops and drainage tiles to keep flooding fields intact,” write Denitsa Tsekova and Brian K. Sullivan. “But there’s problems here, too, growers say: The tractors are costly, the short-season seeds have lower yields, and cover crops and tiling take time and effort.”

Between June 2018 and May 2019, heavy rains have “left fields unplanted, highway and rail traffic snarled, and barges struggling with fierce river currents,” they write.

If forecasters are right, though, the farmers have little choice but to try to get their crops in the ground earlier and more generally adapt to a lot more rain and intense storms during the growing season. A senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts blamed the deluge in the Midwest on a changing climate.

“While farmers have long been locked in a give-and-take tussle with Mother Nature, trends tracked by scientists and forecasters over decades suggest the merciless rains and wild storms that drastically delayed planting times this year could be a weather standard moving forward,” Tsekova and Sullivan write.