A relatively open winter and record warm temperatures in February and March had farmers in parts of the corn belt doing some field work and talking about early spring planting. However, looking at the 7-to-10-day forecasts, growers…at least in the east….may have to settle for a normal season.
Eric Snodgrass, Senior Science Fellow, Nutrien Ag Solutions says, “Eastern corn belt getting shut back down again, storm system that’s coming out of the south early this week, which produce a lot of severe weather, it’s going to move up the east, and that’s just going to put too much rain down to really get stuff going, but I think the Western corn belt might see seven or eight days decent conditions to get things going.”
And Snodgrass says early planting in some areas may be discouraged because he expects cold temperatures to return after April 17th or 18th with a system that gets cut off and spins over the Great Lakes.
“And there’s just some evidence that much of the Northern Corn Belt maybe you can get as far south as maybe 40 degrees north latitude straight across the country we should be able to get a frost temperature in which would be a little bit later than average for parts of the United States. But I can’t rule out the fact cool back down one more time.”
After that Snodgrass thinks the entire corn belt will make good planting progress. Then the attention will shift to lingering drought concerns.
“This fall we had 40% of the lower 48 in some form of drought. Now it’s not about 18% but still talking to farmers in Iowa. I mean, up until recently farmers in Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota and the getting up to the Red River Valley of the north and even Missouri Nebraska there’s people out there that are saying, Man, we’ve not recovered what we’ve lost incrementally over the last four years. 3:06
The models are pushing drought from the western plains into the western corn belt, but Snodgrass says he got burnt by those models last season. So, he’s holding off on that prediction until he sees the timing of the transition from El Nino to La Nina.
