Rainfall helps ease some drought woes as harvests ramp up

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ST. LOUIS — With hopes of a once-stellar corn crop dimmed by a summer of drought, Gerald Jenkins doesn’t expect the unfolding harvest to burden his co-op’s grain elevators, which are capable of storing 9 million bushels of the grain it buys from growers. Finding timely barges to ship it off may be another story.

The same drought that has punished the Midwest’s corn and soybeans for months has lowered the Mississippi River that eases past the western Illinois co-op Jenkins oversees to levels unseen for nearly a quarter century. The shallower waterway — notably from Memphis south to New Orleans — has closed some portions of it while forcing shippers to cut the number of barges their towboats push and the amount of freight in each.

That means Jenkins may have to get in line to ship the Ursa Farmers Cooperative’s goods on the Mississippi, which is among the major inland U.S. rivers that routinely move some 60 percent of the nation’s grain exports each year.

“For us, we just have to be aware we just can’t snap a finger and expect a barge to be here,” he said. “Instead of two days to get a barge, it may take four or five.”

Mitigating matters a bit is that there’s less of a corn crop expected, no thanks to the drought that has been the nation’s worst in decades but increasingly is showing signs of leveling off and, in some key farm states, easing.

The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor update released Thursday showed that recent rainfall benefited parts of the Corn Belt, coming too late to help already damaged corn crops but still likely to plump up maturing soybeans in the fields.

The report shows about one-fifth of the contiguous U.S. remains in the two worst categories of drought — extreme and exceptional.

The swath still dealing with exceptional drop dropped by less than half of a percentage point as of Tuesday, to 5.96 percent.

Tags: weather, news, updates, agriculture, drought, harvest, crops