Now more than ever, Midwestern farmers are weather watchers — and each day counts as those in the western Lake Erie region grow impatient waiting for their fields to dry out enough so they can plant their corn and soybean seed, something they would have done last month under normal circumstances.
But these aren’t normal times on the farm anywhere from Toledo to Topeka. They haven’t been for several years now in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan.
First, there’s the continued fallout from the headline-grabbing massive flooding that has spanned parts of Nebraska, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, and Kansas since mid-March.
Farmers in the western Lake Erie basin said they have kept a close eye on weather systems passing through the prairie states and others near them, hoping that storms out there lose strength as they move east.
With flood damage out there easily expected to be in the billions of dollars this year, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what that could eventually mean to commodity markets and food prices.
Hundreds of head of livestock were drowned or stranded. Stockpiles of grain kept in storage bins became waterlogged and ruined.
For now, though, farmers take a little comfort in knowing the global supply of corn and soybeans is strong — a good sign for two of the most important cash crops.
Still, farmers everywhere are wondering what will happen if water doesn’t recede fast enough for them to get their tractors out on area fields and plant their seed before the end of May.
“We have a challenging weather pattern,” Perrysburg Township farmer Kris Swartz said. “Right now, the trend does not look friendly toward us.”
Although fields aren’t as nearly as devastated in northwest Ohio and southwest Michigan as they have been in states west of here, they’ve been saturated nonetheless. Some fields have water pooling on their surface and are taking on the appearance of little ponds or lakes.
What happens over the next three weeks for rainfall, temperature, and wind is critical in determining whether the 2019 growing season will be as strong as farmers would like.
It’s not a particularly new conundrum for Mr. Swartz, who said his planting seasons keep getting shorter because of heavy spring rain.
More than a dozen years ago, he began a five-year stretch in which he was able to start planting seed on April 26.
Then, the first planting day of the season got pushed back to May 5 for about five years because of heavier spring rain.
Now, with a three-year stretch that began in 2016, May 21 became his target date to start planting.
He seriously doubts if he’ll be able to start that soon this year, with more rain in the forecast. Soil takes several days to dry out enough for tractors and planters to roll across it. Depending on the size of a farm, planting can take another 10 or 12 days, he said.
“There’s not a lot of room for error. We seem to have fewer days to get [seed] in,” Mr. Swartz said. “If we’re still unplanted two weeks from now, there will be some really anxious people.”
As an industry, agriculture has always resisted the knee-jerk impulse of blaming such phenomena on climate change.
But Mr. Swartz is part of what appears to be a growing chorus of farmers coming out and saying there indeed appears to be something happening with our planet’s climate, whether or not the changes can be directly attributed to the big jump in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases getting into Earth’s atmosphere.
They’ve seen firsthand the documented increase in the most unfriendly of all storms to farmers, those that dump three or more inches of rain within 24 hours. According to the federal government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program, the Midwest is second only to New England in major storm events since 1958 with a 42 percent increase.
NOAA and NASA also have found the United States had its third-wettest year in 124 years of precipitation on file in 2018 — with much of the increase in this part of the country.
More specific and timely to Toledo, though, is new data that shows this year’s early part of spring — a combined look at rainfall for the months of March and April, the time of year that farmers would like to start planting once their fields have thawed — is the sixth-wettest on record since 1955. Five of the Toledo area’s 10 wettest springs since 1955 have occurred since 2002, according to the nonprofit group Climate Central, based on data it obtained from NOAA’s Applied Climate Information System.
The general rule of thumb used to be that planting corn isn’t cost-effective if it isn’t done before June.
Last year, Mr. Swartz didn’t finish planting until June 4. He and other farmers were aided just before harvest time by a wetter-than-usual August — something they can’t always count on. On the other hand, a late planting and an August drought is a “double whammy” that can devastate corn yields, he said.
“The compressed window of time doesn’t always lead to good decisions,” Mr. Swartz said, drawing an analogy to mowing grass. Nobody likes to mow when the grass is wet, he explained. But if there’s a break in the weather and there’s a time crunch, people will mow in less-than-ideal conditions, he said.
“We have less days in the field than we used to,” Mr. Swartz said.
At one point during a recent interview, Mr. Swartz walked into his barn. He chuckled at the suggestion that it felt like a baseball team’s dugout during a prolonged rain delay, with his tractor, planter, and neatly stacked bags of seed all primed to get out on the field.
“It’s really hard for people to be patient when we get into these weather delays,” he said. “We’re really in the business of harvesting sunlight.”
How impatient are area farmers getting?
Roger Burtchin, who farms 450 acres in Wood County’s Freedom Township near Pemberville, claims to know of certain farmers breaking out in hives from the anxiety. They are, in other words, so tired of waiting they are literally itching to get back into the field.
He said farmers “try to find things to do,” whether it’s working on farm equipment or something else, to pass the time.
“We haven’t had a day where it’s been fit to do anything,” said Mr. Burtchin, who went into farming full time after retiring in 2000 from a teaching career in the Ottawa Hills Local Schools district. “It’s going to be a crapshoot this year.”
Mr. Burtchin said he wasn’t able to start planting until May 29 last year. Years ago, he would have started planting in April and finished no later than May 10.
“This year, there’s just water standing everywhere,” he said.
He and Mr. Swartz said they believe developments in seed genetics over the years have made their plants more resilient to weather anomalies and given them a fighting chance for strong yields.
In the second volume of America’s fourth National Climate Assessment, released in November, a team of 13 federal agencies and more than 300 federal and nonfederal experts concluded that climate change will wreak havoc on the national economy with annual losses in the “hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the gross domestic product of many U.S. states.”
The potential impact on agriculture is one of the key findings in that 1,600-page report, one of the most comprehensive looks at how climate change could disrupt the nation in the coming decades if left unchecked.
Mr. Burtchin offered no prediction if the trend continues toward later plantings and shorter growing seasons, other than to acknowledge there “may be changes in what people plant.”
“I think the bean prices are going to be so low that everybody can’t switch over. Everyone’s going to get hurt a little,” he said. “We’re in a scenario right now where [the outlook for] both crops doesn’t look real good. And the market for wheat isn’t looking good, either.”
But Mr. Burtchin and Mr. Swartz said there are too many other variables — such as commodity markets, food prices, and national agricultural policy — to say for certain if that would mean more plantings of soybeans and less of corn in this part of the country.
“The trend does not look real friendly to me,” Mr. Swartz said.
First Published May 4, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
