Month after month without enough rain has made Kansas the epicenter of a stubborn drought covering parts of the Great Plains.
While the drought that plagued almost the entire western half of the U.S. last year has relented, it has only gotten worse in Kansas. The state is experiencing the most severe drought in the country and its worst in a decade.
If rains don’t come soon, more than one-quarter of the state’s wheat fields could be in such dismal conditions farmers don’t even harvest them, according to Kansas Wheat.
“I never like to say too little too late,” said Steve McCloud, who lives in Harvey County and serves on the Kansas Farm Bureau board, “but we’re about there.”
Almost 60% of Kansas is experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Only 13% of the state, concentrated in the northeast, is completely without drought.
There’s reason to be hopeful. Matthew Sittel, an assistant climatologist for Kansas, noted parts of the state are expected to get a couple of inches of rain in the next few days. But it will take awhile to recover from months on end of startlingly dry conditions.
“We can safely say it’s the worst drought situation in a decade,” Sittel said.
Drought started creeping into Kansas in the fall of 2021. First, a few isolated counties had mild drought. It started to build in the southwest, and by spring, 10% of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought.
The drought hit its peak earlier this month, with more than two-thirds of the state in the most severe levels of drought. It has since relented slightly.
Crop Failures in Kansas
Marsha Boswell, a spokeswoman for Kansas Wheat, was well aware of the damage from this drought before touring wheat fields across the state last week. She was in southwest Kansas a few weeks ago and said some wheat never emerged from the ground.
But as she drove around the state with the Wheat Quality Council to look at how winter wheat was faring, she was struck by how far into eastern Kansas, which typically gets more rain, the drought reached and the number of fields being abandoned.
Tour participants took measurements to estimate this year’s wheat production. They projected Kansas farmers would wind up with 178 million bushels of wheat.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated Kansas would produce closer to 191 million bushels, still a far cry from last year’s harvest of 244 million bushels.
Source: flatlandkc.org
Photo Credit: GettyImages-IanChrisGraham
Categories: Kansas, Crops, Wheat, Weather