It’s been quite the run of wet weather across a good chunk of rural America. The stretch of rainfall ran for days on end before finally coming to an end. Harvest has slowed to a crawl, approaching the snail’s pace the country saw back in 2009. Bryce Anderson, Senior Ag Meteorologist with DTN, says there are still a lot of commodities to bring in out of the fields.
“There certainly are a lot of crops that need to be brought in,” Anderson said. “There’s no doubt about it. The scenario is probably the slowest from what I’ve been able to gather in checking with producers since 2009, nine years ago.
“The good thing about this year, relative to what we saw back then, is that corn still in the field is drier than what we had back then. So, we have that going on in favor of when we’ll be able to resume harvest. As far as this week is concerned, it’s drier than what we’ve seen.”
There’s an upper-level air pattern that contains high pressure focused over the plains and the Midwest. While the trend is drier, the temps are still going to be cooler, with no warmup on the way to dry things out quickly. Anderson said it’s going to be difficult to get out of the much-below-normal temperature track that the nation is on until at least the end of this week.
“The 6-10-day forecast trends near to slightly below normal from then on,” he said. “The good news is thing will be drier and that should help out harvest progress, but it will still be slow.
“I put the wettest conditions in a number of different areas,” Anderson added. “Parts of central and north-central Kansas are wet, much of Iowa has a pretty wet pattern to get out of, as do Minnesota and Wisconsin. Eastern Nebraska and eastern South Dakota are also quite wet.”