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[00:00:00] Mike Howell: The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research use, and issues helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Dirt. I know we’ve taken a break here during the winter months. Everybody’s had a long holiday season and we’re ready to get things kicked back off. Some places are already thinking about getting this crop planted, and I thought we would take the first few episodes this year to talk about some things everybody needs to be interested in before we get this crop planted.
The first thing that everybody’s gonna wanna know about is what’s the weather gonna do, and I can’t think of anybody better to help us talk about that than Eric Snodgrass. Eric, welcome to the Dirt. Thanks for having me back on. It’s good timing. Eric, if you would, for those listeners who haven’t heard you before, introduce yourself and tell everybody what you do.
I am
[00:01:15] Eric Snodgrass: an agricultural meteorologist. My background is I did all my schooling in the University of Illinois. Then I stayed on there for about 15 years as a professor. I started a couple small companies, which Nutrien bought and I am now their senior science fellow, which means I study weather risk and production agriculture and thankfully get to just tell everybody that’ll listen what I think might not happen.
I get a kick outta doing it, so yep. I’m just a giant nerd who studies weather. That’s probably what I should just have written on the wall behind
[00:01:39] Mike Howell: me, like, Hey, big nerd who likes weather. Eric, we always appreciate you coming on and giving us your insights. I know you’ve got a big team there that helps you out.
We tried to get you to come down to Mississippi for our row crop short course back in December, and there was a scheduling conflict and you sent one of your team down. Matt Rearden came down and talked to us, and Matt gets up and talks for an hour and he shows pictures of cold weather and how things are setting up in Canada.
And he tells us back in the 1st of December that we can expect snow and really cold weather down as far south as the Gulf Coast. January the first. I wake up and I have eight inches of snow on the ground in Poplarville, Mississippi. That has never happened before. And at one point in time we were actually in a blizzard warning.
Matt falls into the same category as Jim Cantore. We’re gonna ban him from coming back to Mississippi. Anybody that can predict snow six weeks out in South Mississippi, they’ve gotta know what’s going on. Eric, what in the world happened with all the snow we had back in the. Middle of January.
[00:02:33] Eric Snodgrass: Mike, this is the right question and here’s what Matt and I were discussing back at that time.
We are in a laia winter that’s now about to finish. We’re just a little ways away from the Equinox. We’re about to spring. A lot of folks should be thinking about what that transition’s gonna be, but this was a Laia winter that also had time cold weather with a pull of Vortex disruption, and it had time cold weather on these major domes of high pressure lived off the West Coast.
You’re going, okay, wait, wait. What does all that mean? That means the central part of the United States had open access to Arctic air anytime it wanted. Now there’s been warm interludes, but for most of this winter, we’ve just seen flow coming straight out. So what did it do? It pushed the storm track out of where my backyard is in central Illinois to your backyard, Mississippi.
In fact, all the way down to the Texas coastline, to the North Carolina coastline. We’ve set snow records in. Florida too. We’ve also set them in the coastal Virginia. We’ve seen ice storms down south, and meanwhile, where I live here in Illinois, we can’t buy snow. We can’t get moisture back into place here because we’re tapping into some of the dry, sterile earth, which comes from the Arctic.
So to be honest with you, this is symptomatic as something bigger going on and trapped underneath the soil. Right outside my house here is falls drought just lingering. So this winter’s gonna be remembered for a lot of things, but I hope we’re not remembering it in terms of just how dry it was in the wrong spots, because where your backyard is, you’ve had more snow than I’ve had here.
More snow than Chicago’s had so far this year. More snow than big chunks of Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Yes. There are places in Mississippi that have had more snow than those regions, and that is just telling of where this pattern’s gonna go. I think about all of it, and I just wonder.
Are we gonna be able to undo all of winter’s sins with good spring weather? And that’s gonna be top of mind
[00:04:14] Mike Howell: for me for the next few months. Well, that’s kind of where we need to figure out, just for the the audience to know, we are recording this February the first, just in case something crazy happens between now and the time we get this aired.
You’ll know when this is. Eric this week I spent time in North Alabama, north Mississippi, and I was driving in snow and ice again back last weekend. We were 80 degrees down here and it got in the low twenties at my house this morning. But how is all this shaping up for the spring and what do we need to know?
People thinking about planting a crop this year? So you need to know this. Okay, I could spend
[00:04:44] Eric Snodgrass: an hour telling you why, but I wanna give you the end result. We have noticed that because of the progression of this weather phenomena called the MJO, I’m attributing a lot of it to the MJO here that our weather pattern seems to be about on a.
Five week repeating interval. Now, it won’t always stay that way. It’s not gonna stay that way for the rest of the year. But here’s what I’m worried about as we’re talking. Uh, this morning it was zero Fahrenheit outside my house. On Monday it’s gonna be 59. We’ve watched these extended interludes of very cold air punctuated with a big warmup that lasts for a couple weeks and then it goes back.
So here’s what I’m worried about. We’re gonna go mild, there’s gonna be some warmer air coming back in here very shortly. Down south, down where you are. We cannot jump the gun again because I’m worried about late March into early April with your next big downturn. That would be on that four and a half, five week turn, and I just cannot rule that out until I have overwhelming evidence.
Here’s the other problem, I think we’re gonna have. Eastern corn belt’s gonna continue to stay wet. Southeast is gonna stay wet. Your side of the Mississippi River, stormy and wet. You get over to the other side and it’s not gonna take much before you get into really dry conditions because during all of this, the western side of the cotton belt over in Texas, nothing very, very dry.
We watched a beautiful November hit that area, but then it got very dry since then. There’s drought in Mexico. There’s the wildfires that hit back in January in the southwest and the LA Basin. And we just look at all of this and we’re just trying to figure out, well, what moves by the time we get to spring.
So I’m just gonna tell you this. Kentucky, north and east of you, right? Just in the last 10 days. Eight to 12 inches of rain followed by record cold, freezing it all over, but that water’s still getting into the Ohio River. So the Mississippi River at Memphis today increased 30 feet over where it was two weeks ago, and they’re up an action stage in terms of flooding.
Go north of there and you’re gonna find yourself in St. Louis where the Missouri River comes into the Mississippi. The river there in St. Louis is three feet below low stage. So this is a haves and have nots, and I’m worried that we’re gonna be mudding in a crop east and worrying about. Drought west. Now you say, well, Eric, what could make you wrong?
If by the time we get into late March and early April, the jet stream has gained its momentum back then, I’m completely wrong. Nobody’s gonna be happy. It’s all gonna be wet and mucky, and we’re gonna be waiting to get things to dry up. But as it stands, take that river east is wet, west is dry. That’s kind of my benchmark on where I think geographically things are gonna be unfolding.
And to be honest, I’ve been telling this story now for about three weeks. Nobody likes me, Mike, like nobody wants to hear what I have to say because it’s a bit. Polarizing, right? I mean, you see these dividing points and man, folks don’t wanna
[00:07:13] Mike Howell: see that, Eric. It doesn’t matter if people like you or not, they need to listen to what you’re saying and what I’m taking from what you just told us.
We don’t need to be in a big hurry to get this crop in the ground because we don’t wanna get into replant situations and have the crop start off in a bad situation. Sounds like we need to hold on just a little bit and make sure things are right before we start planting this crop.
[00:07:33] Eric Snodgrass: Absolutely. In fact, this last week had a phone call with Jeff Tarsi.
You and I know him well. He goes, all right, we need folks to hang on. And I love his accent ’cause I don’t have him. He goes, you can tell him to hang on. Don’t go after this thing too soon because there’s gonna be some folks chopping at the bit because there’s a lot of worry and anxiety about 2025 like what’s gonna happen.
But if I can control early, then I may be able to control late, pump the brakes, make sure that everything is set the way you know that your crop plant should say it should be. Then we go after it. But just be careful. I just don’t like this pattern we’re in just yet.
[00:08:02] Mike Howell: Eric, you already mentioned the wildfires in LA and that region out there.
I know that weather wasn’t the only cause of that, but weather definitely played a role in the severity of that. Talk a little bit about what happened out there and how weather contributed to that.
[00:08:15] Eric Snodgrass: Mike, it’s all about the same story. I mean, it’s the same thing. If you wanna know why it snowed in the southeast, I can tell you the same reasons as why it got so windy with those Santa Ana winds blowing those fires.
The last time the LA Basin had rain before those fires for the middle two weeks of January, the last time was in April. What is symptomatically? The problem in the atmosphere is we were able to get high pressure to build over the Great Basin and send a wind out of the north and east. So from Nevada to the LA Basin that’s backwards.
The flow in that area should come out of the west, but the jet stream this year has been one dimensional because of La Nina. It’s been going way up. North coming at us from the north, which is why we’ve delivered all the cold air and the snow down south. And so these winds came anomalously out of the east through the Mojave Desert over the San Gabriel Mountains.
They descended at 60 to a hundred miles an hour with one to 5% humidity. And did you know, Mike, that they think this might become the nation’s most expensive natural disaster on record once they figure out how much damage was done, it’ll supplant Katrina. But did you live through Katrina in 2005 down there in Mississippi?
I was south of the railroad
[00:09:17] Mike Howell: tracks in Gulf Court. Yep. It was bad. So, you know. This might be the new number one. Yep. And I know what we went through with that and I can’t imagine what they’re going through. Eric, you’ve mentioned La Nina a couple of times already, and I’m hearing things that it may be on its way out.
Tell us what that means for growing conditions and what we can expect further out now That’s the right
[00:09:37] Eric Snodgrass: question. So La Nina, what is it? La Nina is a time period, especially in winter, Northern Hemisphere winter, where the trade winds get going real fast across the Equatorial Pacific. That means they’re coming from the east to the west.
That La Nina peaked in December and again in late January, and has since been really dropping off quickly. Now you say, well, what does that mean for the growing season? Turns out that La Nina is not nearly as important to the growing season as a lot of people may think. In fact, if you wanna correlate to the corn belt where I am, what our summer temperature precipitation pattern is against historical El Nino, or Nini events, the correlations run like 0.2.
It’s not like 0.9, it’s 0.2. So line Nini is fading. It could be very important for southeast severe weather in spring. It could also be really important for south central severe weather in spring. And I’m gonna be honest with you, if you want to get away from all this, talk about one side of the river having flooding, the other side, having drought, we need to flip this around and get the big storms to be in the southern plains.
Now, could La Nina fading fast? Help that? Yes. But I’ll be honest with you, Mike, the most important place to watch is not the Equatorial Pacific where La Nina is. It’s off the coast of California and in the Gulf of Alaska, which I think we’re gonna keep the name right. I know we’re changing Gulf of America, but we’re gonna keep Gulf of Alaska, what it was, right?
So the Gulf of Alaska. Now here it is in a nutshell. If the water in the Gulf of Alaska between now and June gets cold and stays cold central US drought risk goes up. If it warms up central US drought risk goes way down. You’re saying, well, what would cause it to warm up or what would cause it to cool off if the Gulf of Alaska warms up, guess what it’s a symptom of?
It’s a symptom of strong jet stream level winds. What do strong jet stream level winds do? They keep weather systems going. You prevent high pressure from forming. What if you lose those strong jet stream level winds? You lose the reason for warm water to live in the Gulf of Alaska and cold water upwells.
And it’s just telling us, Hey, the atmosphere lost it. Be prepared for drought. So this particular year is just gonna rent way too much space in my brain for the next five months, worrying about who’s gonna have the rain and who is not. But then again, that is every spring and early summer for me. ’cause I’m an
[00:11:39] Mike Howell: ag meteorologist.
That’s
[00:11:40] Eric Snodgrass: all we worry
[00:11:40] Mike Howell: about. You always have something to worry about this time of year. Eric, you mentioned another thing about the severe weather that we can expect in the spring, and we always worry about the risk of tornadoes where I am, but I’ve been hearing the last few years about tornado alley shifting from the Oklahoma region and moving more into Mississippi.
Can you talk a little bit about that and what’s causing that change? Yeah, it is real. So there were
[00:12:01] Eric Snodgrass: three independent studies done. One was done out of Northern Illinois University. Another was done at the University of Illinois. Another was done at Oklahoma University, and they’re all studying the same thing independently, which was good.
That means if their research results align well, it gives us more trust in it. What they’ve noticed is that the new kind of epicenter for tornadic activity, which can happen any month of the year, is the Mid-South and the southeast. The new epicenter, to be honest with you, is probably Memphis. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t tornadoes in tornado alley.
It doesn’t mean we don’t get these things still happening in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska. It just means that there’s been an increase along the lower Mississippi Basin and into the Southeast. So what this means is your worst case scenario, Mike, to be honest with you, is a February nocturnal tornado outbreak.
Nobody’s prepared for that. We expect tornadoes come spring and summer. But man, the fact that we can get ’em any time of the year and they could be at any time of day. I mean just north of you think about December 10th, 2020. That was the year we had the Mayfield, December 10th monster tornado. And I could just pick these things out of a hat all day long and tell you about ’em.
But the reality is the research is backing up all the anecdotal evidence you just shared. And yeah, tornado alley’s shifting toward the lower Mississippi
[00:13:08] Mike Howell: Basin. So excellent point to think about. And we had tornado outbreaks about a week ago, just 20 miles north of my house. We had tornadoes coming through.
That was 600 reports of severe weather in two days in February. Yep. Gotta stay on our toes for that. Well, Eric, we’ve talked a lot about North America and what you’re looking at here. Let’s take a few minutes and go around the globe and see what you’re seeing in other areas. Usually when we do this, we go to Europe first and talk about the conditions over in Europe and what’s happening there.
Western Europe’s been
[00:13:34] Eric Snodgrass: hit multiple times with big storm systems this winter, but honestly, it’s winter. We don’t think a lot about winter crops in that area. They don’t grow as much wheat as they used to. So where’s the wheat grown LA Sea region? Last seven or eight days leading up to the day we’re recording, they had temperatures that got down there about 10 degrees below average.
And there’s some concern that without some of the snow cover, there was some winter wheat kill. Same kind of concern we have for the Nebraska and Kansas. They got hit twice without really good snow cover with some really cold temperatures. No one will know until April, but they’re gonna be speculating about that until April when we get to see what that crop looks like.
China. Has China had an adverse winter that’s worth talking about. No, I don’t see anything over there that’s got me just ringing alarm bells to tell you about what might happen. So I think what we have to do is get down to South America and Australia. Let’s go to Australia first. There’s been some concern.
With major precipitation disparities on their summer crops. But most of Australia grows winter crop. Now they grow some cotton and whatnot, but you know how cotton is, cotton can grow if it gets hot and dry and still do. Okay, so I think the biggest question’s gonna be about Brazil and Argentina. So here’s it in a nutshell.
Preseason concerns. Argentina knew they were gonna cut corn acres by 25%. Why? Because there was that bug that didn’t get killed in winter. The leaf hopper that spread a disease across northern Argentina, Brazil was like, Hey, we’ll take on the acres. And it did. Brazil, just so you remember, has the production equivalent of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri in terms of excess soybeans compared to the United States, and their first crop went in a little bit late.
But to be honest, the pockets of drought that showed up. Were not key acres, they just weren’t, I hate to say this to you, Mike, but it’s like guys in Illinois worrying about drought that’s in Eastern Mississippi. Like, who cares? It’s not gonna hurt what we grow here. And that’s been the problem in Brazil.
The pockets of drought that have showed up were not over key acres to compete with the bigger numbers. They were a little late getting the soybeans out. They’re a little late getting some of the seina crop in. Is there risk on the seina crop? That’s where the narrative gets interesting, to be honest with you.
So soybeans were huge. I think I’ve heard some estimates of size, 175 million metric tons. But on this seina corn crop, you know that Brazil’s corn stalks are very, very low. They’ve got to have a big crop. So can they get 130 million tons? I think they’re gonna have. To worry about another episode of dryness when five weeks from now, five weeks from now, some of this newly planted crop will be going through pollination.
If we end up having high pressure that slides into Eastern Brazil, it could touch Goya or Mad Gross or Ma Gross Soul and possibly punch back against what could be higher yields. Now, what we don’t know, Mike, is how much more acres are they gonna put in because you could hit ’em 10% on yield, but if they put in an extra two, 3 million acres of corn.
It doesn’t matter. The production number’s still high. That will be what the folks that watch those variables are, have to look out for. And we’ll ultimately wait on the USDA to tell us what they think it is. ’cause it seems to be a play against USDA when that happens. But I would just say this, I think there is still some supply side risk on the seina crop coming out of Brazil, but I’m not confident in that.
I just know that I’m gonna be watching it carefully.
[00:16:36] Mike Howell: Okay. Eric, you’ve sure given us a lot to think about. We don’t know what the weather’s gonna do, but you sure do help us get focused in the right direction every time. We have your own. Eric, we talked about an awful lot today. Is there anything else you think we need to talk about before we wrap this episode up?
Well, to be honest with you, Mike,
[00:16:52] Eric Snodgrass: what I would tell folks is because I’ve. Put a case out there that there’s some weather risk on the table, you need to stay in tune, right? You just need a way to keep track of it. And one of the things that I did through Nutrien is I built a website called ag weather.com, ag-wx.com, all of my commentary, all of my maps, there’s 180,000 maps.
If you’re a MAP junkie, you can go there and find ’em. It’s all gonna go there daily. And also through Nutrients Digital Hub. Over the next 12 months, we’re gonna be putting some very exclusive content on that site that’s gonna. I hope has folks go on there daily to just look at that weather risk package.
So that’s what I’m hoping to build and that’s how you stay ahead of the narrative. ’cause you’re right, these podcasts are a lot of fun, Mike, but what do they mean a month from now? That’s the question. So that’s why we need to have the regular update cycle on things. I always look forward to listening to what you cover next, but the weather, it’s gonna change tomorrow.
So that’s what we have to stay on top of it.
[00:17:40] Mike Howell: Ag wx.com. I want to encourage all of our listeners. To check that out, bookmark that. There’s always something new coming on that website. Eric, we appreciate you joining us today. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in. If you will, hang around for just a couple of moments and we’ll be right back with segment two.
Farming Isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At economics, an entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien Economics with a k.com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
Well, listeners, welcome back for segment two this year. In Segment two, I thought we would change things up a little bit and do a quick section on Ask the Agronomist. Now, we’ve told you about our Ask the Agronomist feature in our website, so we’re gonna be pulling some questions that we get or some questions that our agronomy team gets on a regular basis and be sharing those questions and answers along throughout the season.
To start off, we have Dr. Alan Blaylock. He’s senior agronomist here with Nutrien and Alan’s no stranger to the dirt. We’ve heard Alan numerous times on the program. Alan, welcome. Back to the program.
[00:18:51] Alan Blaylock: Well, thanks for having me, Mike. It’s always fun to do these.
[00:18:54] Mike Howell: So Alan, I thought the first question we would start off this year with is we get questions about nitrogen management and how we lose nitrogen.
And one question that we get often is about volatilization. Alan, if you would tell us what is Volatilization?
[00:19:08] Alan Blaylock: Well, very simply, we use that term to refer to the loss of ammonia gas from fertilizer that we apply. That ammonia then escapes into the air, the atmosphere, and that’s really what we call volatilization very simply.
[00:19:22] Mike Howell: So, Alan, why are we concerned about volatilization? Is it really that big of an issue? How much nitrogen can a producer lose through Volatilization?
[00:19:29] Alan Blaylock: Well, volatilization is. Probably one of the mechanisms by which we maybe lose the most nitrogen of any of the other losses. And it’s very common when we have urea applied on the soil surface.
’cause that urea, as it converts to ammonium, there’s an equilibrium in there. And some of that is in the form of ammonia gas. And what happens is as urea converts to ammonium, we get an elevation of the pH right around that urea granule. And as the pH goes up, it shifts the equilibrium towards ammonia gas, which can escape into the air instead of ammonium ion in H four, which is held on the soil exchange complex.
So ammonium being stable and not subject to volatilization. But ammonia gas obviously can escape. And so when we apply re on the surface, we can get pretty large losses of ammonia, and that’s what we call volatilization.
[00:20:23] Mike Howell: Alan, we sure appreciate this and I’m sure we’ll continue this discussion about volatilization In future episodes.
Listeners, we wanna remind you that you can always ask us a question on our website. That’s nutrien-ekonomics.com listeners, thanks again for tuning in this week. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with the Dirt. Hey guys. If you like what you heard today, do us a favor and share this podcast with someone else.
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