A Wet Year Causes Farm Woes Far Beyond the Floodplains

The damage from the destructive spring flooding in the Midwest has been followed in parts of the country by a miserable autumn that is making a bad farming year worse, with effects that could be felt into next spring.

Waterlogged, unplanted farm fields near Gardner, Ill., in
May. Record rainfall in the area postponed crop planting,
 and some 19 million acres went unplanted this year.

Even the widespread flooding in the spring was worse for many farmers than the images of sodden river towns would suggest, said Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois. While the images of overwhelmed levees were dramatic, “that’s not the real story.” Across much of the Midwest and Northern Plains soils were saturated throughout the spring, he said, and many farmers couldn’t get crops in the ground or had to delay planting until perilously late in the season. “Farmers told me in Eastern Illinois it felt like they were in a monsoon from April til May.” 

It was the wettest year on record for the lower 48 states, with the kind of extreme rainfall events that are increasingly associated with climate change. And then fall came in with unseasonably heavy rains and snow. That was the case for Aaron Heley Lehman, a farmer in central Iowa and president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union. “This has definitely been a bad year for almost all farmers in Iowa, even if you weren’t on river bottom ground and having your grain bins explode and your land underwater for weeks and weeks at a time,” he said. “It was still a very rough year.” 

Read the story from The New York Times by John Schwartz - “A Wet Year Causes Farm Woes Far Beyond the Floodplains.”

(The wettest year on record in parts of the U.S. and hitherto unseens droughts in Australia. This, surely, must be the chaotic climate - Robert McLean)

Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why

Tire tracks stretched across the flat lake bed to the horizon. We followed them in a Suzuki 4x4, looking for clues about what’s happened to Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest lake, which has vanished into the thin air of the Andean highlands.

LAKE POOPÓ: The dry, salt-crusted Bolivian lake bed
unfurls into the distance. Boats are stranded; the fish and
 waterfowl are gone. Fishermen who depended on the lake
 are moving elsewhere. It’s a diaspora born of drought.

We were driving on the lake bottom, yet we were more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The spring air was lip-chapping dry. Many of the fishing villages that have relied on Lake Poopó for thousands of years have emptied too, and we drove past clusters of abandoned adobe homes. Dust devils danced around them, spinning in warm winds. In the distance we spotted several small aluminum boats that seemed to be floating on water. As we drove closer, the mirage receded, and we found the boats sitting abandoned in the silt. I stepped out of the vehicle. My shoes cracked the salty crust that had formed jagged lumps, like ice cream in a freezer that has melted and recrystallized.

Read the National Geographic story by Kenneth R. Weiss - “Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why.”