In less than a month, drought conditions have steadily worsened across Indiana, causing farmers concerns over whether they’ll get enough rain to keep crop yields high come harvest.
Kevin Cox, a corn and soybean farmer in Brazil, Indiana, says that planting this year started off earlier than normal due to the dry conditions. “This was by far the best, driest conditions that I’ve ever started planting,” Cox says, “and it held that way all spring.”
While things started strong on his farm with his crops getting a good stand, Cox says the continued dryness has caused his crops to struggle. “We haven’t had much measurable rain since the third week of May,” Cox says. “Last week the temperatures were in the 90s. It’s tough on young plants. We’re seeing a lot of rolled leaves.”
Cox also raises a small cattle herd on his farm and grows the hay to feed the cattle. He says his first cutting of hay this season was a good hay crop, but he’s concerned about the “potential risk of not getting enough rain to get another cutting.”
This isn’t the first time Cox has seen a dry growing season, though. “We had one year here a few years ago where the corn yields were in the single digits,” Cox notes. “It was devastating. We harvested every acre, and some fields had something, but some had absolutely nothing.”
While Cox says he recognizes that he can’t control Mother Nature, he shares that he’s been encouraging people to wash their cars and hang some laundry to dry to try and get it to rain. He says it seems to rain every time he washes his car, so he’s hoping something as simple as that will turn his luck around.
Dr. Beth Hall, director of the Indiana State Climate Office, says that, while there were some isolated storms over the past week, the precipitation they brought wasn’t enough to alleviate the dryness Indiana is experiencing.
“Warm temperatures, low humidity, and little-to-no precipitation suggest that drought conditions are either stable or worsening in most places,” Hall says.
The latest drought monitor map for Indiana confirms the worsening conditions. From May 16 to the June 6 drought monitor map, Indiana saw a steep increase in drought. Just over 1% of the state was abnormally dry according to the May 16 map, while the remainder of the state was drought-free. Less than a month later, nearly 22% of Indiana is in a D1 moderate drought, and 75% of the state is abnormally dry. Just over 3% of Indiana is drought-free.
However, she urges people to not panic just yet. “This is a great time to be more diligent with monitoring conditions and keeping an eye on forecasts as well as thinking about a plan,” Hall says. “Conditions can change rather quickly.”
Hall says, though, that historically when El Niño has been present during the summer months, those months “have more often been associated with wetter-than-normal summers.”
Looking back at previous El Niño years, Hall says that, of the most recent three years that were associated with El Niño, two had above-normal precipitation from June to August. “I think this provides some hope that our current summer may still bring more precipitation than what we’ve recently seen,” Hall says.