drought

Faced with prolonged and intensifying drought in the northern Plains, USDA opened a still-larger portion of the Conservation Reserve, ordinarily off-limits to farm work, to emergency haying and grazing. In its fourth announcement of permission for landowners to use the idled land for livestock forage, the USDA said haying and grazing would be permitted on wetlands and on buffer strips, often used to protect waterways from farm runoff, that are enrolled in the reserve.

Drought in the Horn of Africa has killed the livestock of nomadic herders and forced thousands of pastoralists into refugee camps, dependent on food aid. Authorities in Ethiopia, while dealing with the crisis, are looking into longer-term adaptations, such as introducing irrigated agriculture and small farms in the country's Somali region, "a land long known for just herding animals," says the Washington Post.

By 2050, a number of U.S. water basins will begin to experience water shortages if there is no action to reduce greenhouse gases, says a team of MIT researchers. The study says several basins, particularly in the Southwest, will see their existing water shortages become "severely accentuated," says the MIT study, published in the journal Earth's Future.

With drought intensifying in the northern Plains, the USDA is taking an additional step to help ranchers short of livestock forage. The owners of land idled in the Conservation Reserve have USDA approval to harvest hay from the set-aside land in counties in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana where drought conditions are rated as "severe" or worse.

Futures prices for spring wheat soared 40 percent in a month and hit nearly $8 a bushel at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange on Monday, a four-year high, due to drought in the northern Plains, said the Wall Street Journal. The spring wheat prices, far above USDA's forecast of a season average $4.30 a bushel for this year's wheat crop, illustrate the demand for high-quality wheat despite a global glut.

Drought is intensifying in the northern Plains and a quarter of North Dakota, a cattle and wheat state, suffers extreme drought, according to the weekly Drought Monitor. With hot and dry weather expected to continue, USDA vastly expanded the region where ranchers can graze livestock on Conservation Reserve land, normally out of bounds.

Spring and early summer are the wet season for the northern Plains, a cattle, wheat, and corn-growing region, so the dry start to this year’s growing season could have a lasting impact, says the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor.

For the second time in a week, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told lawmakers that government is a greater threat to U.S. farmers than drought or disease. And in nearly the same words at two House hearings, he offered the might of the U.S. government to boost farm income through larger food and ag exports.

While California languished in a five-year drought, most state water districts didn’t adhere to a 2007 law that required them to track how much water they delivered to farms, reports The Sacramento Bee.

Unless critical habitat is protected and restored, researchers say three-quarters of California's 31 native trout, steelhead and salmon species "will be extinct in the next 100 years," says the Sacramento Bee. "California’s record-breaking drought that officially ended this winter wreaked havoc on many of the already-struggling fish, which depend on cold water."

Farmers have collected $3.65 billion in crop insurance indemnities on 2016 production, a much smaller amount than in preceding years. Economist Gary Schnitkey of the University of Illinois says the loss ratio — payments divided by premiums — of 0.41 was the lowest in 27 years of data available on the Risk Management Agency's web site.

After five years of statewide drought, crop plantings in California have been delayed by too much rain, causing prices to rise. Some industry experts think prices could stay high until mid-May. The delays “have led to shortfalls of crops including lettuce and broccoli and sent wholesale prices soaring,” says Bloomberg News.

When drought reduced streamflows and irrigation water allotments, growers in California's Central Valley pumped more water from their wells. Now a study by NASA and Stanford scientists says decades of overpumping permanently reduced the storage capacity of the aquifer beneath the valley by 336,000 to 606,000 acre-feet, which could exceed the capacity of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir that is the primary water supply for San Francisco.

West Coast fishery managers decided to severely restrict the commercial salmon season in California this year because of historically low numbers of adult chinook salmon in the ocean, says the San Francisco Chronicle. The drop in population is a lingering effect of the five-year drought.

Following the nearly record-setting rain and snowfall of last winter, California Gov. Jerry Brown removed most of the water conservation directives that were imposed during the five-year drought. State officials say they will "clamp down on wasteful water use and impose a long-term conservation program that could create conflicts with urban water users," reports the Sacramento Bee.

In a case that could have ramifications for farms and ranches across the arid west, a Native American tribe in Coachella, Calif., has set a new precedent for tribal ownership rights to groundwater.

The four-year drought in California has heightened attention to a long-running problem for irrigated agriculture in the Central Valley: the salt that accumulates in the soil over the years from the crop-sustaining water, says Environmental Health News. Options range from draining away briny subsoil water to retiring land altogether because crops can no longer grow on it.

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.