drought

In its largest set of declarations since mid-May, the USDA designated 101 counties in the Midwest and West as natural disaster areas due to drought. The designations make farmers and ranchers eligible for USDA emergency loans.

Farmers from Georgia to California told a House Agriculture subcommittee on Wednesday that the foundation of the 2023 farm bill should be the taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance system. They also expressed interest in the creation of a standby disaster relief fund.

Warm and dry weather brought "widespread worsening of drought and dryness" to the upper Midwest in the past week, particularly in Iowa and Wisconsin, said the Drought Monitor.

The government will deploy 15,000 firefighters, 1,600 engines, and 625 aircraft against what is expected to be another dangerous year for wildfires, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday.

In a two-day burst, the USDA designated 372 counties, roughly 1 of every 7 counties in the country, from Texas and Kansas to California and Hawaii, as natural disaster areas due to persistent drought. At the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded California's drought emergency to 41 counties, including parts of the agricultural Central Valley.

Large swaths of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are abnormally dry and most of Michigan is in moderate drought due to limited spring precipitation, said the weekly Drought Monitor on Thursday. Arid conditions covered 48 percent of the Midwest, the heart of U.S. corn and soybean production.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack were named Wednesday to be co-chairs of a Biden administration working group charged with addressing worsening drought conditions in the western half of the nation.

Growers in the Klamath Basin, in the Pacific Northwest, will receive the smallest amount of water ever from the federal government due to unrelenting drought, said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Wednesday. The water will be available around June 1, weeks later than usual.

Centuries ago, the Zuni people in the arid Southwest region of the United States developed a sophisticated farming culture, channeling water towards crops and breeding climate resilient seeds, reports Tim Folger, in FERN's latest story, produced with The Weather Channel. But that culture was also likely wiped out by a rare 50-year megadrought that may now be underway again in the West. <strong> (No paywall) </strong>

Major to moderate flooding is likely this spring from the northern Plains southward to the Gulf Coast, with the greatest risk in the upper and middle Mississippi River basin, the Missouri River basin, and the Red River of the North, said NOAA on Thursday.

Based on surveys conducted ahead of USDA reports due for release today, analysts say corn plantings will total 86.7 to 87 million acres after a rainy and cold spring. That would be well below the 92.8 million acres that farmers had planned to seed.

Researchers analyzed centuries of tree-ring data and found that human-generated greenhouse gases were driving drought conditions around the world as early as 1900, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The study, described by National Geographic as the “first of its kind,” substantially confirms what climate models have shown.

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.