Guest essay by David Archibald
A correspondent in the Corn Belt emailed on 10th August:
“Here in north central Illinois at exit 56 on I-80, most of the corn was planted by May 15.
The GDD totals since May 15 at Moline, Illinois.
- May 15-31 + 1.7 GDD >normal.
- June 1-30 – 32.7 GDD < normal.
- July 1-31 – 94.5 GDD < normal.
- August 1-9 – 33.9 GDD < normal.
Total since May 15 = 1695.0 GDD = -159.4 < normal, or about 8 normal days in early September. Corn that has a 2,500 GDD rating needs about 40 days yet. Most of the corn planted in NC Illinois is in the 2,450 GDD to 2,700 GDD maturity area.
The area of greatest risk is in IA north of Route 30, MN, WI and the Dakotas.”
The corn market doesn’t see a problem with corn prices off 30%-odd from where they started the year, as shown in Figure 1 at right.
To illustrate the problem in parts of the Corn Belt, Figure 2 shows the average Growing Degree Days (GDD) experienced in Northwest Indiana, fairly close to the center of the Corn Belt:
From where we are at the time of the incoming correspondence, marked on the graph at 10th August, the heat received by the corn crop starts falling away.
Staying in Northwest Indiana, if we assume that the crop there was also 159 GDD below a normal season, Figure 3 illustrates the effect of on achieving the necessary 2500 GDD for crop maturity:
The upper red line shows the cumulative GDD for a crop planted on 15th May if the season had been normal from that date. Under that case, 2,500 GDD would be achieved by 26th September well before the first frost date for the area. The season has been colder than average with GDD for July 15 per cent below normal. The green line shows the fate of the crop if the season reverts to normality from 10th August. Under that case, 2,500 GDD is reached by 17th October, very close to the first Fall frost date. The lower dark blue line shows the effect of the season being 10% cooler from here.
While we cheer on the Arctic sea ice extent, there are farmers in the northern half of the Corn Belt who are now concerned about how their crop will finish.
Related articles
- Corn in U.S. Seen by Cordonnier at Risk of Damage From Frost (bloomberg.com)
- Indiana Farmers Look for the Heat to Return (hoosieragtoday.com)
UPDATE: Lows this morning from Dr. Ryan Maue – Anthony
James B,
Exxon Mobil has declining discovery trends precisely because they completely missed out on the shale boom in the US and elsewhere. Your citations are great propaganda, but they don’t really reflect the reality of the situation, which is that if countries allowed exploration, mining, well drilling, and fracking everywhere that we KNOW FOR A FACT there is recoverable coal, gas, and oil, we would have more than enough for the next 250-350 years including accounting for rising demand.
Wonder what BloodyMess has to say about the cool summer?
Also, James B, it’s your ignorance that sticks out, no Richard Courtney’s. You utterly disregard the shale revolution and its discovery of literally hundreds of times more hydrocarbon reserves than were previously thought to exist.
Charles Tossy says:
August 14, 2013 at 2:30 am
More carbon dioxide in the air means faster growing plants. On the other hand, if it is raining all the time, those twenty ton tractors can’t be taken out into the fields.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes and it is STILL soggy on my farm. I have never been able to dig a fence post in clay in the summer before because the ground turns into a brick yet we are still able to dig them easily.
We have also gotten some nasty thunderstorms with high winds and trees down.
Outrageous Ampersand says:
August 14, 2013 at 6:00 am
…So, if the corn harvest is smaller and the ethanol guys still buy up the required amount, that just leaves less corn for food and feed.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Cow corn is used to make ethanol. The Sheep and Goat feeds I use are pelleted and mainly Distillers Grains By-products sometimes called Processed Grain ByProducts. SEE: The Value and Use of Distillers Grains By-products in Livestock and Poultry Feeds
David Archibald says: @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 6:50 am
….A Yara fertilisers presentation I read recently showed the results of European wheat yield trial which went from 2 tonnes/hectare without any nitrogenous fertiliser to 8 tonnes/hectare fully fertilised. So locally three quarters of protein consumed comes from fossil fuels…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
David, a very promising breakthrough was made.
Well, won’t THAT put organic farmers on the horns of a dilemma! Or not….
I did not read every comment, but…
Increased CO2 increase yield in C3 plants like soybean and trees, it does not increase yield in C4 plants, like corn.
Corn has been a key crop in Iowa since the 1920’s and maybe earlier. Corn is a tropical plant but selection has adapted almost worldwide, from the tropics to Alberta.
Corn does have a GDD requirement, but it is not absolute. Corn also senses circadian periods (day length) and thus much of the corn will dry down a bit later but not require the exact GDD so this is unlikely to matter much unless we get an early frost.
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 8:22 am
….It was interesting to hear organic and conventional farmers comparing experiences at a conference I attended in Adelaide in the early 1980s. Cereal growers relying heavily on bag fertiliser had more serious disease problems than those relying on rotation between pasture and sheep with cereals.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am not surprised to hear that. Crop rotation including pastures and hay has been an agricultural main stay for centuries. Also
Sheep Sh1tErrr organic fertilizer builds soil and holds moisture better than a bag of commercial fertilizer.We have gotten away with monoculture farming and NOT using rotation for the last sixty or so years because of commercial fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides but ultimately you ruin the soil as my farm shows. Lost over two feet of loam since the soil survey done in the 1940’s so now I have 98% pure clay. It was sold CHEAP because it could no longer produce a crop.
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
It is all about the length of the growing season. Annual trends of shorter growing season, is a clear indicator we are on the cusp of the Next Grand Minimum. Stay tuned for the frost reports on northern edge of the corn belt.
_Jim:
Re your post at August 14, 2013 at 9:41 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/13/the-us-corn-belt-and-the-summer-chill/#comment-1389837
You are right that “discovery trend” is a meaningless statistic. And the reason you are right is why crude oil reserves were ~40 years throughout the last century and will be ~40 years throughout this century.
Oil companies need a maximum planning horizon of ~40 years.
So if a company has less than 40 years of reserves then it pays for the discovery of more.
And if it has more than 40 years of reserves then it doesn’t pay people to find more.
A reduction in the discovery rate of a company merely indicates the company has discovered sufficient reserves for the next ~40 years.
Richard
PS
Reserves are the amount of a mineral which can be obtained at economic cost.
Resources are the amount of a mineral which can be obtained using existing or imagined technology.
Echoing many other comments here.
I live near DeKalb Illinois, corn capital of maybe the world.
Cold weather is upon us. Tonight it will get down to 52F, hardly normal August temperatures.
I also have lots of tomatoes on the plant, but most are still green, ripening delayed by the cool nights I believe.
James B:
re your post at August 14, 2013 at 11:34 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/13/the-us-corn-belt-and-the-summer-chill/#comment-1389966
Thankyou for the compliment. Perhaps you could try to be charming, too?
You are not “getting under my skin” but your mindless blather is annoying.
I gave you clear argument and information.
As usual, you provided links to information you don’t understand and doesn’t say what you assert.
Please attempt to provide sensible comments. Your attempts to be disruptive waste space on threads.
Richard
An early frost will merely depress yields; it doesn’t mean crop failure. Late maturing corn is a problem but not a disaster. It’s amazing we grow so much corn in northern latitudes these days. If the weather routinely shortened the growing season, North Dakota might go back to wheat, sunflowers and flax. As long as corn’s price stays high, they’ll continue to take their risks with corn. Nothing yields usable carbohydrates like corn. It is an amazing food plant.
“Air pollution from Europe’s 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year”
Oh, good God, not ‘premature deaths’ again.
Last time I looked at a report of ‘premature deaths’, what the actual study actually said was that people who were going to die of some horrible disease were probably dying up to two weeks earlier than they would have done in pollution-free utopia, but they couldn’t be certain because they’d just guessed many numbers for which they could find no legitimate studies, so the real number of ‘premature deaths’ could be half or less of the headline numbers.
Like so much of modern ‘science’, ‘premature deaths’ is a meaningless term used to sex up boring studies that show no real harmful impact.
I wouldn’t get too worked up about corn. To quote a North Dakota farming family friend: “corn is a weed, you can grow it anywhere”. He’s right. Corn is grown from sea level to right here in Colorado at 5 to 6 k ft. Sure there are problems in different areas but there is so much planted everywhere that it is hard to put a dent in the crop. And there are always more places to plant corn. I grew up in Southern Ohio; it was planted on the bottoms and it was planted on the ridges. There were good years, and bad. That’s just the way it is.
James B.
Your arguments are contraindicated by several facts:
1. It wastes more energy to convert corn into fuel than it does to convert coal, oil, or natural gas into fuel.
2. Converting corn into fuel ultimately produces MORE CO2 than burning any of the more efficient types of fuel, because REGARDLESS of what you burn, the products of combustion are ALWAYS going to be CO2 + H2O, so you are better off burning more efficient, higher energy-density fuels for energy.
3. You have to PROVE that human-caused global warming actually exists (which it apparently hasn’t for going on 18 years now) before the amount of CO2 produced by humans is of any concern whatsoever. The so-called (and non-existent) consensus is not proof.
4. “Premature Deaths” is the most bogus statistic in the universe. Life has a 100% mortality rate. If you are born, you are guaranteed to die. If you don’t want people to die, then apparently you need to abort all of them while they are still in the womb, since we are told that a majority of people don’t actually believe that they are live people yet at that point. There is no way of knowing when someone is “supposed to die”, so there is no way of knowing if their death is “premature” or not.
@Peter B –
It’s called projection, Peter B.
I don’t hold all of the positions indicated in your questions.
Psychology 101 – Projection. You ‘projected’ your beliefs about what I must think onto me, and wrote the questions to match. Which actually reveals more about you;
Everybody does it – me too. Let’s take them by the numbers.
1. Perhaps, but I doubt it – you gotta show me the data. Compare total energy consumed per liter/gallon of fuel produced, from planting to gas tank or mining/extraction to tank. Biofuels have an advantage, they are renewable (plants), coal/oil/gas are not.
Bigger issue for all transportation are CO2, and all other GHG emissions (I don’t care if you agree, validated by 98% of climate science studies worldwide). Natural gas = methane, approx. 50x CO2’s global warming potential.
Biggest issue is creating transportation systems w/ 0% GHG emissions – many very smart people working on this, that’s another topic.
2. Transportation doesn’t burn coal anymore, and it depends on the engine used – but again, provide reliable scientific data supporting your assertion.
3. Wrong my friend. Science doesn’t prove things, it measures them. Here’s a simple explanation of how scientific work is done – if 100 scientists get very similar measurements from the same experiment, then they all agree that what they measured is reliable – it’s true. That’s scientific consensus – you can call that proof. If you disagree, then you have to show that the experiment itself is invalid, or the interpretation of the data result is incorrect. That result also has to be replicable, multiple times.
In the case of AGW, there is a,significant consensus (IPCC, 90+%, over decades of studies) in the scientific community that the increased heat in our planetary systems (earth/air/water) they are measuring is human-caused, from a number of sources.
4. Bull. Call it what you like, but read the article, then tell me what you think.
Thanks for your honest straightforward questions.
James B
Chicago
Someone asked about corn crop production in the 60’s & 70’s versus recently. I couldn’t find statistics by state (probably could with much more research time.) But here are some corn yields from the USDA:
60’s 70’s 80’s 90’s 2000,s
3,906.95 4,152.24 6,639.40 7,934.03 9,915.05
3,597.80 5,646.26 8,118.65 7,474.77 9,502.58
3,606.31 5,579.83 8,235.10 9,476.70 8,966.79
4,019.24 5,670.71 4,174.25 6,337.73 10,087.29
3,484.25 4,701.40 7,672.13 10,050. 11,805.58
4,102.87 5,840.76 8,875.45 7,400.05 11,112.19
4,167.61 6,289.17 8,225.76 9,232.56 10,531.12
4,860.37 6,505.04 7,131.30 9,206.83 13,037.88
4,449.54 7,267.93 4,928.68 9,758.69 12,091.65
4,687.06 7,928.14 7,531.95 9,430.61 13,091.86
40,882. 59,581. 71,532. 86,302. 110,141.99 Totals
So it looks like yields have gone up an average of 20-25% per decade since the 1960s.
From: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/feed-grains-database/feed-grains-yearbook-tables.aspx#26761
Also, since that has be an agricultural related topic, I would like to thank all of the farmers for our food. My great grandfather came from France to farm in upstate New York & my grandfather grew up on a farm in Batavia, NY. When I was a child in the 1950’s grandpa had a corn patch out in the back yard.
I agree with the elevated risk of freeze damage to corn and beans this year. Damaging freezes in the Cornbelt/Midwest are rare events though. The last time we had one of significance was September 1995.
That freeze event started on Sept 21 in the Western Cornbelt but did the most damage on the mornings of Sept 22 and Sept 23 in the Eastern Cornbelt, especially in IL/IN.
If you want to view exactly how that one happened synoptically, go to this link. Its best (for me) to not use the loop boxes and only put in a current date thats at least 10 days before the events, then advance manually using the + options(either by 24 hours or 12 hours). This way, you can let everything soak in/analyze and when your ready, go to the next map. You can put in a current date of 1995-year 09-month 01-day 00-cycle and use the + option to head forward.
http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ncepreanal/
Just summarizing the event from 9-1-95. The Midwest and Plains has seen a hot/dry late Summer and that continued with an upper level high thru the first few days in Sept.
The heat helped our crops to mature quicker(especially corn that advances with heat units/growing degree days). However some places, especially the beans in the Eastern Cornbelt were still behind because of a wet Spring and late planting.
The first sign of a big pattern change, gave us a sneak peak early in the 2nd week when we saw some weak upper level ridging in western Canada and a deep upper low in the vicinity of n.Hudson Bay area. The amplification of these features would be required to flush south cold air from very high latitudes later in the month.
Extreme amplification is exactly what happened, thanks to an extraordinarily strong(for Sept) 150+ mph jet stream roaring across the Pacific.
On 9-17, you can see that Pacific jet, just coming into this picture from off to the northwest of the view.
This powerful jet carving out a very deep upper level low in the northeast Pacific that amplifies into an incredibly intense storm in the vicinity of the Gulf of Alaska towards the end of the 3rd week of Sept, causes the flow downstream to buckle hard.
The upper high in western Canada gets pumped into a massive feature and all the energy associated with the Hudson Bay low east of the high just digs straight south towards the US.
With time, the upper high actually gets pumped more n/northeast and becomes positively tilted(which can maximize the meridional flow southward downstream) as the upper low, originally to its east, digs straight south and even southwest, well into the Plains states, then the Midwest.
On 9-17, as these features are amplifying, a very cold air mass with 850 temps less than -10C is in central to northern Canada, poised to dive south, following the anomalous flow between the upper high and digging trough.
For the next several days, the pattern intensifies and cold air plunges bodily into the Plains and Midwest. The mornings of 9-22/23 were the coldest in outlying areas(farms) of IL and w.IN with readings in the mid 20’s and some colder spots in the low 20’s.
It had not rained for a long time and top soils were bone dry. This contributed to the temperature plunge, under clear skies and calm winds at the center of the surface high with dew points, as I recall well down into the 20’s. Dry air has less heat capacity and with the inversions under ideal radiational cooling like this, dry soils don’t modify the coldest(dry) air near the surface as much as moist soils. My guess is we were at least 5 degrees colder than what would have occurred with a moist top soil.
Many soybeans still had all green leaves before this event, evidence that they still needed a good 2-3 weeks to mature(my estimate at that time).
Several days after the freezes, some fields turned to almost a blackish color, while other fields stayed green and some fields having both green regions and black one.
This was evidence of the cold air drainage that took place, with many of the most damaged soybeans located in the lower lying areas.
Other evidence of this here in southwest IN, was the coldest reading at the Evansville airport stayed well above freezing(37 might have been the lowest if I recall).
Yet at my house, 5 miles north, the water in my garden hose completely froze on 2 successive nights.
That airport thermometer was 5 feet off the ground and also closer to the city. My garden hose and those soybean plants were in the country and closer to the ground. Radiational cooling nights often feature strong inversions with much colder temperatures in the lower 5 feet of the atmosphere.
A pattern like this in September is extremely rare…………………..and we haven’t had anything like it since. I have no doubt that its happened before and will happen again.
In fact, in 1974 we had what they called a great Labor Day freeze, 3 weeks earlier than this. Not as cold but probably more damage because it was even earlier.
Use your starting date to view that one as:
1974-year 8-month 26-day 00-cycle
http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ncepreanal/
“However, it seems to me that a certain amount of fuel ethanol still has to be produced each year by law, and much of that come from corn. Thus, the amount of corn going into ethanol production won’t budge, regardless of how much corn is actually grown. So, if the corn harvest is smaller and the ethanol guys still buy up the required amount, that just leaves less corn for food and feed.”
False … Last year a perfect example – with the far lower crop production as a result of drought the ethanol industry reduced their consumption by almost the entire shortfall in corn crop production. You can search here for my posts on corn production and ethanol and find details.
In effect the ethanol segment of corn production acts as a large and useful corn “reserve” system. If we have a poor crop the industry is able to modify their production, and use of corn, to accommodate.
James B:
re your post at August 14, 2013 at 2:17 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/13/the-us-corn-belt-and-the-summer-chill/#comment-1390124
You again demonstrate your complete ignorance of science. For example, this sentence
Consensus has no place in science; e.g. Einstein’s response to the 100 scientists.
Mathematics provides “proof” but science does not: science seeks falsification.
I offer you the helpful suggestion that you stick to architecture and ask us scientists about science because your repeatedly stating profound scientific ignorance is wasting space on threads.
Richard
Minnesota expects 2nd largest corn crop in history
http://www.startribune.com/local/219409041.html
Even considering the late start, the excessive rain early, and the cooler than normal temps, the MN corn crop is expected to be in record territory … weather is forecast to warm considerably over next several weeks and into early Sept, which will only help.
Some farmers are predicting near 200 bushel/acre yields – far above the national average expected at around 154 bu/acre
James B,
“1. Perhaps, but I doubt it – you gotta show me the data. Compare total energy consumed per liter/gallon of fuel produced, from planting to gas tank or mining/extraction to tank. Biofuels have an advantage, they are renewable (plants), coal/oil/gas are not.
Bigger issue for all transportation are CO2, and all other GHG emissions (I don’t care if you agree, validated by 98% of climate science studies worldwide). Natural gas = methane, approx. 50x CO2′s global warming potential.
Biggest issue is creating transportation systems w/ 0% GHG emissions – many very smart people working on this, that’s another topic.”
Here’s the data for you James. Corn for ethanol is the one of the dumbest things in history. I would say “THE” dumbest and unprecedented regarding the fraudulent, manipulated data to perpetrate this total ruinous, extraordinarily expensive scam using politics, propaganda and false rhetoric(lies)……………. but CO2 as pollution beats it out.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/digital/pdf/spring_13/kiefer.pdf
[+emphasis]
For those of you who didn’t notice — as I didn’t at first glance — the term GDD is explained along with a link for amplification on it.
mark fraser said @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 10:19 am
No, why would it? Organic farmers supply a market that demands GMO-free produce. The introduction of yet another GMO crop is, to say the least, irrelevant.
That’s why I added the “… or not”