Worst Midwest Drought in YearsBy Scott Kilman, Wall Street Journal
We're getting to the point where the plants don't have much flowers left. It's not good news." – Agronomist Bill Wiebold
The worst drought across the east-central United States since 1988 is shrinking potential harvests of corn and soybeans, and slowing commercial shipping on some rivers.
The dry spell, now in its fifth month, is blistering productive farmland and draining tributaries that feed the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Those are crucial pathways for hauling commodities such as salt, petroleum products and cement-making materials to Midwest cities....
So far, the economic fallout from the prolonged drought isn't as broad as the impact of the 1988 dry spell, which shrank the U.S. corn harvest by 31 percent and sped the consolidation of American farms. The swath of affected land this time is much narrower than it was 17 years ago.
Moreover, the economic damage from the drought is being partly offset by a marked easing of a drought across the northern Plains that baked farms and ranches for more than five years. Most economists, for example, expect the rate of overall food inflation to cool this year, largely because of weakening cattle prices.
The Midwest state hardest hit by the drought has been Illinois, typically the nation's biggest producer of soybeans and the second-largest producer of corn, behind Iowa.
According to state authorities, tens of thousands of Illinois farmers already have lost one-third of their potential crops, which is worrying merchants in farm towns across the state. A survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 55 percent of the Illinois corn crop was in very poor or poor condition last week, as well as 34 percent of the soybean crop and 74 percent of Illinois pastures....
Production of corn nationwide should fall 16 percent this year, to 9.9 billion bushels from last year's record harvest of 11.8 billion bushels, mostly because of drought damage in Illinois, eastern Iowa and Missouri, said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co., a commodity forecasting concern in Chicago.
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