drought

Two weeks of rainy and snowy weather "has provided California a foothold for drought recovery but three straight winters of subnormal precipitation will take time, possibly several consecutive wet winters to recharge the reservoir levels and...

"The most profitable year on record" for hog producers "will be 2014 with estimated profits of near $55 a head," says economist Chris Hurt of Purdue.

With California seeing its first major rainstorm of the season, the Los Angeles Times said, "Scientists have yet to determine whether the Eastern Pacific is falling into an El Niño pattern and will produce a wetter than average year...

Congressional efforts to provide drought relief to California farmers are dead for this year, according to Sen Dianne Feinstein, says the Associated Press.

Three states in the Great Plains - Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma - account for nearly half of crop insurance indemnities paid so far this year, say USDA data.

Serious drought cut yields sharply on as much as 15 percent of corn land in China, second to the United States as the world's top producer, says USDA. It estimates the harvest at 214 million tonnes, down 8 million tonnes from estimates made before the brunt of the dry weather was felt.

Growers in California harvested a record crop of tomatoes for processing, the thick-skinned varieties used in making soup and pasta sauces, says Bloomberg.

Parts of southern Somalia are being hit with floods, "aggravating the already alarming food security situation" cause for a lackluster rainy season, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Californians are praying for rain this winter but the three-year-old drought is likely to persist or worsen in large parts of the state, says the Telegraph. Some 58 percent of the state is under "exceptional" drought, the direst rating used by the government.

"(T)he nation's largest irrigation district is in the wrong place," says the Los Angeles Times in story about the Westlands district of the Central Valley of California and its role as a driving force behind a $25 billion projects to ship water from...

Brazil's soybean belt is critically short of rainfall, in the view of consultancy Oil World, which sees a harvest of 89 million tonnes this season, said AgriMoney.

As many as 2 million rural Californians rely on household wells for their water, says NPR. "Some of those people are among the hardest hit by the state's severe drought, as wells across the state's Central Valley farm belt start to go dry."

While U.S. rice production is zooming, California will see its smallest crop in 16 years, said USDA in its Rice Outlook report. The harvest was forecast at 36.4 million hundredweight, down 24 percent due to drought that restricted plantings.

California's agriculture sector would shrink but survive a mega-drought that lasts decades, says the Los Angeles Times, based on computer simulations by university scientists.

The persistent high pressure ridge of air in the northeastern Pacific Ocean that has blocked winter storms from reaching California is three times more likely to occur in current times than before the Industrial Revolution began the buildup of greenhouse gases, said scientists at Stanford University. Blocking ridges of air occur periodically but the current ridge is exceptional for its size and duration, they say. It has diverted precipitation-bearing storms into Alaska. This is an event that is more extreme than any in the observed record, and our research suggests that global warming is playing a role right now," said associate professor Noah Diffenbaugh in a statement.

Rice growers in drought-baked California expect twice the reduction in their crop than does USDA. An official with the California Rice Commission told CBS Sacramento that rice plantings and harvest area will be about 420,000 acres this year, down 25 percent from 2013. California is the largest grower of short- and medium-grain rice, the types used in sushi. The rice crop is worth $5 billion, so the smaller crop could mean $1 billion less in rice revenue.

fter years of culling herds in the face of high grain prices, U.S. livestock producers "finally have a positive multiple-year outlook," writes economist Chris Hurt of Purdue U, boosted by more affordable commodity prices, waning of drought in the southern Plains and higher household income. "Animal industries are expected to be in a mini-boom phase in coming years led by rising per capita consumption, continued small growth in U.S. population, and growing export demand," Hurt says at farmdoc daily. Some cropland will return to pasture.

One-quarter of the world’s crops, from bananas and plantains to rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans, are grown in areas where the water supply is highly stressed or highly variable, said the World Resources Institute on Wednesday. Rice, wheat, and corn, three of the most important crops, are particularly vulnerable, it said.