The Great Plains could see its most significant drought in a decade, Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist for Colorado and a research scientist at Colorado State University, wrote in the Washington Post on April 11. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 70% of the Southern Plains region is currently in a severe drought or worse. This is up from just 7% six months ago.
Precipitation deficits tell one part of the story. The Southern Plains area has received between 2 and 8 inches less than average for the last six months. But evaporative demand, or the potential loss of water from the surface, is also running at extremely high levels thanks to higher temperatures, a lack of humidity in the atmosphere, and winds that dry surface soils.
As a result, U.S. farmers have abandoned a large amount of winter wheat just at a time when the war in Ukraine has put pressure on U.S., Australian, and Argentine sources to replace grain exports from Ukraine and Russia. Winter wheat conditions for the country are the poorest they have been in the last 20 years for the beginning of April. On the Great Plains, the amount of winter wheat in good to excellent condition is a mere 30% (down from 53% last year), and the amount in poor to very poor conditions is 36%, up 20 percentage points from last year.
Conditions are likely to get worse before they get better, according to the Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal outlook for April, May and June. In the Texas panhandle, for example, there’s a 56% chance that the season will be drier than average, and only an 11% chance of wetter-than-average conditions.
With wheat–and corn and soybeans and seed oil crops–at or near a record high and supplies looking likely to fall short of demand, this isn’t good news for U.S. consumers already seeing run-away food price inflation and it’s even worse of vast numbers of people in the developing world who depend on imported grain to prevent starvation.
