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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt, with me, Mike Howell, an economics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by economics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38)
Listeners, welcome back to The Dirt. I hope everybody’s having a great growing season this year, and the crops are getting all the rain that they need in order to reach their full potential. Now, I realize that we’ve got some areas that that drought just won’t turn loose, and honestly, it’s been tough around here this year. I haven’t had a rain in going on four weeks, and I wake up this morning to record a podcast on drought, I’ve got thunderstorms rolling through. I hope it doesn’t pick up in the recording too bad, but we’ve got about a half an inch of rain since daylight this morning and it’s still coming.
(01:09)
Karl, we appreciate you joining us. I appreciate you doing an episode on drought for us, and more importantly, I appreciate the rain that we’re getting because we’re doing an episode on drought. For listeners that’s been tuning in, you recognize Dr. Karl Wyant, he’s director of agronomy here with Nutrien. Karl, good morning.
Dr. Karl Wyant (01:24):
Good morning to you, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike Howell (01:26):
Look forward to our discussion today, Karl. We were planning to talk a little bit about drought today, and you live in an area that’s definitely prone to drought, don’t get a whole lot of rain. I’ve probably got your month’s total rain already today.
Dr. Karl Wyant (01:39):
Mike, just to give the listeners some flavor of drought, I live in Arizona here in the desert. We have some of our farming areas that only get three inches of rain total a year, and that, if you go to the wet part of the farming areas, you’re talking 12 inches of rain a year, so not a lot of rainfall. When it does rain, we go a little crazy, we shut down, and people forget how to drive. It’s a good time.
Mike Howell (02:01):
I understand, we’re in the same situation with snow. People don’t know how to drive. Karl, let’s dig in and talk a little bit about the drought. I know some areas are hit harder than others, and you keep up with the drought monitor. Where are the worst areas today for the drought?
Dr. Karl Wyant (02:16):
Yeah, that’s a great place to start. When we talked about drought last year on the podcast about the same time, drought was really a Western US and Southern Plains phenomenon. We were talking much of the Rocky Mountain West, much of the West Coast, just under crazy drought. I was looking at some statistics, and this time last year, Arizona was under just considerable drought. If you go to California, we were talking 97% of California was in the D2 and D4 stage, so that moderate to exceptional drought. And if you look now, 72% of California’s not in any drought at all, so if you can think about the drought, it’s picked up and it’s moved east considerably.
(02:55)
And the places where we’re seeing it, it’s still that stuck area in the Central Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, but you’ve got to keep going to the east to really find the new areas, and that’s the Midwest, where, this time last year, we were looking at 75% of the Midwestern area was not in any drought at all, but if you look right now, this morning when I was checking some stats, 81% of that area is in that moderate to slightly droughted area, so 81%. It’s been a quite drastic change over the last 30 days. We call that a flash drought, where high temperatures and lack of rainfall can trigger some dry conditions pretty quick.
Mike Howell (03:33):
Karl, you talked about it being in the Midwest predominantly right now. Are there some other areas that we’re looking at it spreading to? Is it going to get significantly worse over the next few weeks? What’s it looking like on the forecast side?
Dr. Karl Wyant (03:45):
Yeah, if you look at the one-month outlook for drought, really, it’s the upper Midwest, so Iowa, Illinois, and then moving in a band across that Eastern Corn Belt, into Indiana, Ohio, parts of Pennsylvania, that are expected to develop a drought, and this was released at the beginning of the month, and this is going into June. We’ve got some challenges here in the Upper Midwest, the Western and Eastern Corn Belt. And then, if you look at the total season, the three-month outlook, this drought is expected to move its way north as well, up into Wisconsin into parts of Minnesota and Michigan. That drought is expected to remain across the [inaudible 00:04:25] states.
(04:25)
So lots of challenges here, and I think challenges that are coming at a tough time, ’cause we just planted the crops, we just got through planting 2023, and we’re coming into some challenges early on, and some challenges that are expected to remain throughout the growing season.
Mike Howell (04:39):
I looked at the drought monitor map earlier today, and it doesn’t show my area as being in the drought, but I haven’t had a rain for right out a month, and that really puts a hurt on us. Fortunate, we’re getting a little relief today. I had a call yesterday from a good friend in North Carolina, and he’s in the same situation. He said the corn’s about three feet tall and about the bottom two feet of it is brown already, not a good situation to be in. But you go a few miles down the road, and they’ve gotten some rain and things look a lot different. It all depends on exactly where you are.
(05:10)
Karl, let’s move in and talk a little bit about what crops are going to be affected by this drought. You mentioned the Midwest, and we know a lot of corn and soybeans are grown in that area. What else could we be looking at?
Dr. Karl Wyant (05:20):
If we keep our map of where the drought is right now, that Central Plains region where we’ve just had that drought grip there for a couple of years now, and it’s improved substantially since this last fall, but it’s still there, so Nebraska, Kansas, and then we move into the Western and Eastern Corn Belts and Soybean Belts. When we look at acreage, the USDA released some statistics just last week showing that, of all the acres in the United States, 57% of all the corn acres are under some drought stress right now, just because of where the drought is in the Midwest, 51% of soybeans. And then, we go back to our Central Plains example, 64% of the sorghum acres, and then 50% of winter wheat. It’s quite a wide swath here, and I think there’s a lot of listeners here that, if you’re in that big geographical space of the Central Plains, all the way to Indiana, you’re most likely starting to feel the effects of this drought.
Mike Howell (06:15):
Karl, you mentioned corn and soybeans, and over 50% of each of those crops are in the drought area right now. What’s the most critical stage of development in terms of moisture? When do they need most of their moisture?
Dr. Karl Wyant (06:26):
Crops need moisture the whole season, and there’s no way to get around that, but you can split it into two separate stages of when you absolutely have to have adequate moisture. And we can split it into the vegetative growth, where you’re just growing leaves and stems and roots, then you have the reproductive stage, and that’s the stage that pays the bills, that’s where the yield comes from. Once a crop transitions into those reproductive stage, so flowering for soybeans and tasseling for corn, that is when drought stress really starts to impact your yield, and you’re talking about daily yield losses of up to 10% for corn when they’re under drought stress during those pollination stages or tasseling stages.
(07:05)
So we’ve got a little bit of time in some of these states to hope it rains, like maybe you did this weekend, Mike, and talked about drought and then all of a sudden it rained. Maybe everybody who’s listening, go wash your car a couple of times, that usually seems to make it rain. So early on, we have some drought stress, but those early vegetative stages don’t use nearly as much moisture per day in the soil, so they can get through this with hope and some prayers. But it’s not until those later stages when it really starts to have that big impact on your yield and on the bottom line
Mike Howell (07:34):
Yeah. And early on, during the vegetative stage, it’s really not such a bad thing to be at a little deficit on water. It’ll make those roots go down deeper and start probing out more moisture. That’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, we don’t want to start any kind of irrigation too early and shallow those roots up so that they can’t get what moisture is in that soil. Karl, we know the effects of the lack of water on the plant, it can’t survive without the water, but what about on the nutrients? How’s nutrient uptake into the plant affected with lack of water?
Dr. Karl Wyant (08:02):
When we’re thinking about fertilizers, and then I’ll move into some comments on manure and compost use, and then I’ll end up talking about nutrient uptake, anytime you have a fertilizer, you have to dissolve that in water, so if you are using a lot of dry fertilizers, like urea, your muriate of potash, MOP, or even 11-50-20 in your plan, or even AMS, ammonium sulphate, you have to take that little solid piece of material and dissolve it in water, and that’s the first step. If you don’t have any moisture in the soil, and I’m sure some of the listeners have experienced this in really dry years, the fertilizer will just sit there, and it will stay in the [inaudible 00:08:39] form or the granule form, and it’ll just hang out because it’s not dissolving, there’s not enough water to solubilize it, and separate the cation and the anion, which is what you want.
(08:48)
Let’s just, for argument’s sake, we’ve dissolved the fertilizer, and now we’ve got to get it into the crop, and this is where some challenges can occur with just some of these fertilizer nutrient uptake pathways, or just nutrient uptake pathways in general, where we have to get nitrate into the roots. Nitrate can be problematic under dry conditions, because nitrate moves through the mass flow mechanism, so it’s moving through that soil moisture stream up into the plant as that plant transpires, and so if there’s not enough moisture or that crop is limited in its ability to do transpiration, all of a sudden, you can have a nitrogen uptake problem. And potassium, to a lesser degree, can suffer through the same problem. If you look at something like phosphorus, that doesn’t move through mass flow as much, that moves mainly through diffusion, but you can have some issues with just solubilizing your fertilizer with phosphorus materials.
(09:40)
I wanted to talk about manures and compost, because in this process, we’re driving decomposition. If you went out and spread a bunch of manure or compost and it’s really dry, now you can have a similar issue. You’re not solubilizing these materials, you really are relying on those microbes to decompose. Microbes don’t like to decompose materials in the absence of moisture, so you can have your manure just sit there and hang out, and your crop won’t receive the nutrients if it’s too dry to run that decomposition process.
Mike Howell (10:10):
Karl, what about liquid fertilizers? Does that just take away the step of solubilizing and everything else the same, or is there any other steps if you’re using a liquid fertilizer?
Dr. Karl Wyant (10:19):
One advantage of liquid fertilizers is that it’s already in water, so the water’s included. You’ve already dissolved it, you’ve already solubilized your material so that they don’t have that first stage, so that can be an advantage, if you have an opportunity to use liquid fertilizers, to really cut that first stage out, get it into the soil, into the root zone, and it’s already ready to go. That can be one advantage of using liquid fertilizers. The disadvantage is the amount of nutrients you can deliver per pass is not as high as the dry fertilizer. It depends on what you’re trying to do and what kind of problems you’re trying to solve, whether you choose those liquid or dries.
Mike Howell (10:52):
All my life, I’ve heard an old saying that everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. I know we can’t go out there and physically make it rain. Some growers have the luxury of being able to turn an irrigation system on and get some water to the crop that way, but in the absence of that, what can growers do about this situation? Is there anything they can do leading up to it to help the crops better withstand this drought?
Dr. Karl Wyant (11:15):
I mentioned the go wash your truck a couple of times and that’ll maybe make it rain, maybe that’s step one, and listen to this podcast, maybe that’ll help with drought, trigger some rain in your area, like it did for you, Mike. Coming into this, one of the choices you can make is that variety selection. You have a tremendous choice now in the market of what variety of corn you plant, what variety of soybeans you plant, et cetera, and there are more drought tolerant varieties, varieties that are bred for some of these dry conditions, so that first choice might be that step in what seed you select. And that’s where you can use some of your tools that are on the US drought monitor, they forecast out three months, about the middle of the month, every month, when you’re making your seed selection choices. You can say, “Well, I think drought’s going to come, so I’ll maybe choose this variety over another.” So that’s a choice you can make.
(12:02)
There’s also been some improvements here, and growers have focused on soil health to help manage moisture. And this isn’t an in-season play so much, this is more of that long-term goal, where, if you can get your soil structure to reconstitute itself, re-aggregate, come back together, you can actually get more water down into the crop when it does rain or the snow melts, get more moisture down into the soil and store it for later and bank it for when you need it during dry times. There’s a whole lot of options for improving soil health, including reducing tillage, using compost and manures, cover cropping. There’s products out there that talk about their soil health benefits, so I think that’s worth making some of those choices in the off season, can steer your fields and your operation into some drought resilience, if you feel that’s going to be an issue moving forward.
Mike Howell (12:53):
Karl, there’s a mixed play on some of this stuff. I have seen some growers that’ll actually go out and do some deep tillage, actually rip in between the rows, and their way of thinking is, if they break that soil up, it’ll let the water move down deeper into that soil, and if they get a big thunderstorm, they can actually catch more of that water. Now, based on what you just said, tillage isn’t going to help improve our soil structure and make the water move into it any better. A different way of looking at things there. Are these guys right? Are they wrong? What’s your thinking on that?
Dr. Karl Wyant (13:24):
It depends on what are they tilling into, and sometimes, we get these issues with soil crusting, where the top of the soil becomes a sidewalk or a driveway and you can’t get water into it one way or the other, so tillage is how you break that up and move water down. So in that instance, it’s a good strategy, and I’ve seen that happen. I’ve also seen growers run that deep tillage because they’re trying to flip the moisture up into more of the surface, or the first couple feet where the plants are growing, and so that they can turn that moisture up and let the roots grow into it, so that’s a strategy. I think it really just depends on what timeframe are you thinking about? Is it the long-term, which is some of those options I mentioned with the soil health because that’s not an overnight fix. That variety selection can help you forecast, if you’re forecasting drought, can I get prepared with my variety? And then, Mike, there’s some options there with tillage and a short-term approach that you can use to manage moisture.
Mike Howell (14:18):
Karl, let’s look at this situation that’s going on in the Midwest. The way I’m understanding it, I haven’t been in that part of the country yet this season, but it sounds like they’re right in the middle of top dress season. Anybody that’s wanting to do split applications of nitrogen, it’s time to get that second application out there. If you’re sitting there in the middle of a drought, what do you do? We talked about we need to have this moisture available to get the fertilizer into the plants. Do we need to make any adjustments, as far as rates or timing, or what can growers look at as far as fertilizer management?
Dr. Karl Wyant (14:48):
Split applications are a great way to improve your nitrogen use efficiency, get more fertilizer into the crop, and leave less sitting in the soil, or losing it to water to below the root zone, so a great way to manage nitrogen. I think the biggest takeaway here is, if you are in drought conditions, start thinking about, well, am I going to take a hit on the yield? And that’s where you can start adjusting what you come back with on your side dress. It might not be a 100% of your full rate, it might be 90%. If you’re expecting that a little bit of a yield hit, that’s where conversations with your field scouts and agronomists can really help point you in the right direction.
(15:23)
We’re still pretty early. This drought is hitting us during that vegetative stage across much of the Midwest, so it’s still early. I haven’t pulled the full fire alarm here for the emergency, but it’s still early. So I say get with your team and advisors and see where does this nitrogen need to go on this side dress pass, so you can make sure that you’re hitting a reasonable yield gold and optimizing your nutrient input at the same time.
Mike Howell (15:46):
Karl, you mentioned the yield goal, and obviously, if we’re in this severe drought situation, that’s going to affect our yield, but just want to remind everybody, if you’re looking at how much nitrogen a crop like corn needs, that’s based on your projected yield. So if your projected yield is going to go down, obviously you need to make some changes to that. Another strategy that may work, if you were planning on a two-way split of this nitrogen, you may want to consider a three-way split. Put out a little bit now and hope you get a rain. If you do get another big rain, then you could come back and put out some more nitrogen later on if it looks like you still have the potential to make a crop. Just want to remind everybody to pay attention to what’s going on. Nobody’s situation’s going to be exactly the same. Just use all of the tools you can to help manage this situation this year.
(16:30)
Karl, let’s just, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that this drought does hold in place and it gets as bad as it did last year. What about carryover effects on these nutrients? They’re not going to be able to be taken up by the crop. Have we just lost those all together, or will they be there for next year? What do growers need to know about that?
Dr. Karl Wyant (16:48):
We went through this two summers ago, up north of the border, when Canada went through a severe to exceptional drought across much of their plains area where they grow, where they put out fertilizer, then they just got hammered by a drought, widespread drought. And so, when we went and did soil sampling after the season, viewers can’t see this, but I said season in air quotes here because it wasn’t much of a season, but when we did the end of the year soil sampling, we saw that we had a lot of nutrients left over. And that was actually something we had planned for the 2022 growing season, because we had some nutrients left in the bank account, the carryover, like you said, Mike. So it’s more soil sampling comes into play, where you can say, “Hey, I put the fertilizer down and I got hit by a drought. What can I plan to use for next year?” And that’s where soil sampling, especially for potassium and phosphorus, those don’t move a whole lot in the soil under most conditions, so you can bank those away, and put it into your nutrient budget, say, for 2024.
(17:41)
Nitrogen’s a little trickier, because soils love to lose nitrogen, whether it goes up in the air as a gas, or it leaches below the root zone with water, or it leaves the field through some erosion event, so it loves to stay off the field. If you’re trying to measure your nitrogen carryover, I would wait, not count on the fall for those numbers, I would look at those numbers right before planting so you can get an accurate estimate of where your nitrogen numbers are at, especially if you get hit with a drought.
Mike Howell (18:09):
Down in my part of the world, we’ll get hit with a bad drought every so often. For corn growers, especially dry land corn growers, they tend to think about baling this corn up for hay, trying to salvage something out of it. I just want to remind everybody about some nitrate toxicity issues. If you decide that it’s not going to be worth taking this crop to yield for grain, decide you need to bale some of it for hay, make sure you do a nitrate test on this corn before you do it. We sure don’t want to get nitrate levels too high and run into some other problems there.
(18:42)
Karl, you’ve talked a lot about drought today. Where can growers go to get more information about drought or to assess how bad the drought is in their area?
Dr. Karl Wyant (18:50):
Yeah, fortunately, we have some great tools here in the United States for monitoring drought, and if you go on your phone or on your laptop and just type in, “US drought monitor,” that will take you to one of our main resources. It’s hosted by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and there’s current maps, there’s historical maps, you can get all the statistics you want. I mentioned those categories, the D0s through D4s, you can see is my area, my part of the world, how much has drought impacted me? You can look at it by percent acreage, and you can find your fields and see where you’re at on that. So US drought monitor, great place to start, and you can even sign up for a weekly update on where drought is in the United States.
(19:30)
If you’re in Canada listening to this, type in the, “Canadian drought outlook and monitor” into Google, and you can find the similar resource, but for mainly the Prairie Provinces in the Maritimes.
Mike Howell (19:41):
Karl, we appreciate you joining us today. Is there anything else that you want to mention about the drought or what growers can do to help get through this situation?
Dr. Karl Wyant (19:48):
I think it’s worth mentioning that we’re still early in the drought, I just want folks to remember that, in the growing season, so we haven’t hit that reproductive stage across most of the drought impacted areas. And if you look at where the droughts recently developed, we’re still really on that slightly dry scale, so it’s not full bore red, code red, yet. In fact, across the Midwest, 81% of that region is in the D0 through D1 stage, so that’s abnormally dry to moderate drought, it’s a slight to moderate drought pressure. It gets worse as you go higher, like D2 is severe drought, D3 is extreme drought, and then D4 is exceptional drought, so the colors on these drought maps that the drought monitor produces, the redder they get, the worse it is. So much of the Midwest is still this yellow to beige color, so it’s not the worst thing.
(20:38)
I think we’re still at a time where there’s reasons to still plan on having a good yield, it’s just how we get through these next two weeks to three weeks, I think, will really determine where you’re at. I’d say get with your advisor and your local team that you use and rely on to help produce the crop. There are products out there that can reduce drought stress, and you can put them on as a foliar, to help reduce some of these impacts of drought and signal to the plant, like, hey, it’s a slight drought pressure, start revving up your genetic machinery to get through this. And then, there’s also some of those other options you mentioned, like the tillage, and I always mention that maybe the third option is going to wash your truck, because that always triggers a rainstorm.
