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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podKast 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, news, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38)
Well, hello again everyone, and welcome back to The Dirt. Today we have Eric Snodgrass with Nutrien Ag Solutions. Eric is a agriculture meteorologist and does a really good job at talking about weather conditions all across the world. Eric, welcome to The Dirt.
Eric Snodgrass (00:53):
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Mike Howell (00:55):
Eric, if you would give our listeners a little background about yourself and tell them a little bit about what you do.
Eric Snodgrass (00:59):
Yeah, you bet. I’m born and raised in central Illinois and started off near Springfield, Illinois and moved over toward Champaign. So that’s where I currently reside is just outside of Champaign, Illinois. I’ve always been into atmospheric sciences. In fact, I chose that study in school and went right on through and ended up teaching at the University of Illinois for about 15 years after I graduated. And it was through that time period that I started a couple of small companies and Nutrien had an appetite for one of the companies I started and that’s when I joined them full-time after they bought a company started called [inaudible 00:01:28]. And so I’ve been working for Nutrien since 2019. What I do day-to-day is keep an eye on the weather and its potential impacts on production ag not only here in the States and in Canada, but South America, in fact the whole rest of the world. So it’s a fun job. Every day a new problem to solve when it comes to the way weather’s going to impact what we do in this business.
Mike Howell (01:44):
Thanks, Eric. One question I have before we really get started is I hear the term meteorology and climatology thrown around a lot. I know they both have a lot to do with the weather and I actually had to look this up to see what the difference was, but if you don’t mind kind of talk about those two and what the difference is.
Eric Snodgrass (02:00):
It is interesting because you do hear meteorologist or climatologist or even atmospheric scientist, and I guess what I would say about it is if I had to break those terms down, I would say that nearly every meteorologist is also a climatologist and atmospheric scientist. What I mean by that is you have people that study the day-to-day variability of the weather, those being meteorologists, but they must know something also about historical weather information climate. Right. And then they also have to know how the atmospheric works, which is what atmospheric scientists do. But you can have atmospheric scientists that can’t forecast the weather. One of my very good friends and colleagues, her name’s professor Nicole Reemer, she’s a brilliant atmospheric scientist and she studies the chemistry of the atmosphere, but she couldn’t forecast the weather if you asked her to. That’s not her area of expertise. So you see it all kind of funnels down into a few different channels, but what I do is I kind of bridge all three.
(02:51)
So I not only study the day-to-day weather and its variability, the meteorologist side of me, but I have an extensive experience studying earth’s past climate and understanding how not only recently it’s changed in terms of keeping track of all the different weather records, but looking back even farther than that. And at the same time, my background initially was purely in atmospheric sciences where I studied radar systems and satellites and those are kind of ancillary to the whole picture. So I hope I get to bring kind of the full perspective here at Nutrien when we look at all three of those things combined.
Mike Howell (03:20):
I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to listen to our podcast before, but I really don’t tell a lot of stories or jokes or that kind of stuff, but this one’s just too good an opportunity to pass up. Several years ago I walked out the front door and my second son was probably five or six years old about the time, and I looked up and he was about 30 feet up in an oak tree. He had climbed just as high as he could go and was just having a ball up there. I said, son, get down out of that tree. He said, but dad, I want to be a climatologist when I grow up.
Eric Snodgrass (03:50):
I have never heard that one. I like it. I’m going to steal it and use it because that’s a good one.
Mike Howell (03:54):
Well, that was an actual true story. It really happened and I don’t know where he came up with it, but he’s always full of wit, but you’re welcome to it.
Eric Snodgrass (04:01):
You know what’s funny is I often get people when they hear I’m a meteorologist, you would not believe the number of times that I’ve had people think that I study meteors or study space. In fact, no joke, I was just in Phoenix, Arizona the other day when I flew and I got my Uber ride to the conference centre. The guy that was driving me in the Uber, his name was Jorge. Jorge turns around and says, what do you do for a living? And I said, well, I’m a meteorologist, I’m an atmospheric scientist. The first question out of his mouth was, do I believe aliens exist and what about other planets? I’m like, wait a minute. I don’t study outer space my man. I study what we call hydro meteors. That’s the wet stuff that falls from the sky, not the rocks. It’s funny how often that happens. Those terms get a bit confusing.
Mike Howell (04:39):
Yeah, they do. So Eric, let’s get to the dirt and talk about the weather conditions. What can you tell us about North America to start with? I know we’ve got some drought areas going on. A lot of people really need some rain. Down in the South Delta, South Mississippi where I’m at, we just can’t catch a break. We’re getting a two-inch rain every week and we need a break to get the crop in the field. So what’s going on? What can you tell us?
Eric Snodgrass (05:00):
The country’s split in a big way right now. In other words, if you were to look at a drought monitor map, you’d find that most of the West is in some form of drought. And when I say most of the West, I’m starting at right around the 100th meridian. You hit West of the central part of the country and the drought’s quite extensive. In fact, earlier in the year, in late winter, early spring, we had almost 75% of the land area at one point in some classification of drought. Now springs helped eliminate some of that. For example, where you are down in Delta, we were dry early, but then it has been nonstop precipitation throughout much of spring. So there’s been major delays in that area and every time it rains you flood those tributaries to the Mississippi and all the surrounding rivers down there and the low ground it’s just, it didn’t get planted fast because of these issues.
(05:41)
You go just straight West to there, get into West Texas, Western Kansas, parts of Nebraska and we were talking about some places that had had the driest start to any year since we’ve been keeping record, we got 130 years worth of data there. The Western and High Plains, we saw multiple massive dust storms. We saw stuff that was very reminiscent of things we learned about from the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s and you keep going over the mountains, you head out to California and while April brought in better precipitation to parts of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, you can still see that most of California’s lack of moisture in January, February, March, which is the heart of their wet season, was way below average. In fact, almost nothing. So they’re going to go into a year where there’s going to be major water stress because some of the big reservoirs like Shasta Lake Oroville have less than half of their normal filled up.
(06:28)
So they’re like 40 to 50% full pool right now, which is a problem. And you come up to where I live in Illinois, it won’t stop raining and it’s been too cold. So from the Pacific Northwest all the way through the Midwest, we’ve had these warmups that have lasted two to three days and then we’ve had cold air that’s coming behind it and in fact talk about cold air in the Pacific Northwest, some places had their coldest April on record and it hit tree fruits pretty hard. It hit the vineyard industry hard with freezes that were happening after bud break. And then don’t forget, in North Dakota and Montana, they had two massive blizzards that hit putting down in some places over 36 inches of snow each.
(07:03)
So we have had a wild ride this particular spring. And it’s got a lot of us worried about summer and the big thing that’s on all of our minds is what’s going on with La Nina and is it going to continue? So yeah, you ask a, what was a relatively simple question, but I’m telling you everybody around the country is feeling something and this extends into the Canadian prairie as well.
Mike Howell (07:22):
Right, and I just got a notice on my phone this morning. You mentioned California and the far West. They said that everybody, I think it was six million people are in water conservation mode now. It’s mandatory water conservation just because of what you were talking about. So definitely some ups and downs and wild rides. Now where I’m at this time of year, we start paying a lot of attention to the hurricane forecast and what they’re talking about as far as the summer patterns and that kind of stuff. And that really goes to even as far North as where you are. You all will get a lot of weather coming off of these hurricanes depending on which way they come in and stuff. What can we talk about as far as hurricanes this year and severe weather threats across the country?
Eric Snodgrass (08:00):
Well, let’s start with hurricanes because we’re pre-season on the hurricanes. We’re in this severe weather season. So on the preseason side of the hurricanes, we got two things we’re watching. Currently, the ocean temperatures in what we call the main development region. That’s where the hurricanes form out there in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean and the Gulf, the ocean temperatures are either near average or they’re warmer than average. So that’s one ingredient that’s already primed to help the season produce bigger storms with more rain and potentially stronger winds. The other factor is there’s a La Nina in the Pacific and a La Nina in the Pacific tends to calm the wind shear down in the Atlantic. And what that means is when any tropical system gets going, because a lot of them are born off the coast of Africa, for example, they’re not going to fight against a high shear environment, which means they’re going to be able to develop.
(08:42)
So what do we see? Well, if an average year has 14 to 15 named systems, this year the number’s looking like 19 to 20. So we’re looking at another above average season, but just remember the last two seasons we had 21 named systems in 2021, and then in 2020 there were 30 name systems, meaning we ran out of names, had to use the Greek alphabet for the last nine systems, which that’s only happened one other time in the history of naming hurricanes. Now what’s interesting about hurricanes is it only takes one, right? You could have a hurricane season that’s weak as could be, but if there’s a hurricane Andrew in there or Hurricane Katrina or hurricane Sandy, it doesn’t matter. That one can do the damage of so many and maybe down where you are, you think about last year with Ida coming up right up the gut of the Mississippi or in Texas Harvey in 2017.
(09:24)
And you’re right, we watch him carefully here because I think back to May of 2018, we had a tropical storm named Alberto, and Alberto came right up the gut of the Mississippi in late May and rained on Illinois and Indiana. We got enough rain from that tropical system that we didn’t need any more rain in June and we’ve been perfectly fine. These things are really important. Now you ask about severe weather. So thunderstorm stuff. 2022 has been very active so far, right? We are well above average in terms of tornado count. We continue to see above average throughout the month of May and then going on further than that.
(09:58)
Our winds, our severe winds is right on average. The only thing that’s below average currently is hail. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of people complaining about that, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen some big hail. Typically, when there’s a La Nina, the mid South to the Southeast start off with very active severe weather and then it moves back over there toward the central plains once we get fully into the month of May. So yeah, my friends at Storm Chase, I used to be a storm chaser, loved it, but my friends that do it now, they’re quite happy with this year.
Mike Howell (10:24):
Eric, you’ve talked about the severe weather and the potential for that in May. What are you looking at for our summertime forecast?
Eric Snodgrass (10:31):
Yeah, well, a lot of folks are concerned about drought. Right. And it’s been the first time in a while we’ve had major concern about drought. So if you just think about the Midwest specifically, what typically gets us most worked up about the risk of drought is going to be preseason what the ocean temperatures are doing in the Pacific. We worry about cold water in the Gulf of Alaska, cold water coming off the Baja of California and La Nina, that’s right along the equator where there’s cold water. And you say, well, why do you worry about that? You see the ocean temperatures are a symptom of what the atmosphere is doing and what typically happens is to get those ocean temperatures cold, the jet stream tends to favour coming more into the Northwest in summer and then running up over a ridge in the midsection of the country.
(11:09)
Ridges are when the jet stream goes North, all the fastest flows in Canada. We’re left with weak jet stream flow right over the heart of the Ag belt in the midsection of the country. When that happens, you just don’t get as much rain and the heat builds in and that all compounds really quickly and you end up running yourself into a flash drought scenario right when your major crops in the midsection of the country. So corn and soybeans specifically are hitting pollination or they’re flowering or something like that. This year, unlike almost the whole last decade, we have risk.
(11:35)
So we haven’t seen that for a long time and it’s simply because we’ve now had our second La Nina persist over the last two years and there’s concern it’s going to last for another year. So what’s going to happen is we’re going to worry until there’s nothing to worry about. That makes sense? We’re just going to watch it until it breaks. If it doesn’t break, we could be looking at substantial risk, which means means more upward movement and the price of these crops and these commodities right now. If it breaks, it could be the first thing that could trigger something kind of a bit of a breakaway from where we’ve seen some of these commodity prices.
Mike Howell (12:03):
Yeah, we definitely need to keep an eye on this. I understand the severity of these droughts that are coming in and with everything that’s going on in the world today, we’re needing to make a bumper crop this year just to be able to feed everybody and the weather just doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with us, especially right now. But hopefully things will change and we can get a better outlook before we get too far along. Eric, what about the rest of the world? I know we need to talk about South America a little bit. They’re a major influencer in the world markets. What’s the weather looking like down that way?
Eric Snodgrass (12:31):
Yeah. South America had two very distinct growing seasons this past winter for us and summer for them. What happened was early in the season, record drought in Southern Brazil and that hit a big part of the crops growing there. So we saw production numbers come off of a projection of 145 million metric tonne on soybeans down to about 120. That was the first big shock. Then the Safrinha or second crop went in fast, but then it finished under dryer conditions limiting its potential and that just again put pressure on the global balance sheet. So South America’s now going into their dry season and they got to sit and wait until we get to about September when they’re going to go after the next crops. In the meantime, Argentina will put in a winter wheat crop, which we’re going to keep a close eye on. But other than that, South America is kind of right now in the off season.
(13:15)
Australia, this same La Nina made much of Australia very, very well, especially the East. There were points over there by Brisbane where back, oh gosh, this was a couple months ago. One part of Brisbane saw over 800 millimetres of rainfall in about 10 days. So that is more than 30 inches in a 10-day time stretch. We then think about the impacts happening across Europe, right? Of course there’s a war that we’re keeping an eye on. We know that what that’s done. There’s concern that we may have Ukrainian growers that may not be able to plant a crop due to the geopolitical issues that are going on there, but just like in the United States, La Nina historically increases the risk of drought over the Russian wheat belt and the Ukrainian growing areas. And so even if they do get something in, we have to be on the lookout for late summer heat stress in those areas.
(13:59)
What’s going on right now? I just rattle off basically five things and all of those five things, if they tilt in a certain direction, we could really see just, well, the supercycle staying super. If we have things starting to shift and break, that could really change up a lot of things about the way the rest of the season goes. But here’s the scary thing about all of it. If I were to tell you that the 2022 corn crop was going to be 175 bushel per acre average across the country, you wouldn’t think much about that, that’s a good size crop, but that would be roughly five bushel off a trend. Given how tight everything is, it’d be amazing just to think to be five bushel below trend could cause such a major shock to the global supply. So we are sitting here at the beginning of a season watching a lot of moving pieces and unlike much of the last decade, those moving pieces are having, really setting the grand stage for what could continue to be a highly volatile marketplace when it comes to the commodities we grow.
Mike Howell (14:50):
Yeah, it’s definitely a whirlwind right now. We like to see these high prices, but when we see high prices, we’ve always got some issues going along with it. If you’re wrong on the weather forecast, our prices may come down, but we may get enough grain to feed everybody. If you’re right, we could be in a bad way, but the prices will still be good. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Eric Snodgrass (15:09):
And here’s the thing about all of it, all it is about the future. Right. Everything I just told you about was the future, what’s happening, what’s going forward, and we’re bad at predicting the future. Everything from meteorologists to Ag economists to all of us. It’s a difficult thing to do. So we just try to watch out for the big things and we keep an eye on them, make sure that we’re honestly watching how they’re shifting so that we’re prepared. And that’s the thing that I want to think about and that’s one of the great things I love about Nutrien is that we can respond at scale to these things and that’s one of the benefits of being Nutrien. And I’m excited to partner with the growers on managing this risk as it goes forward and I hope that I maintain their trust and I’m very transparent about our forecasting skill and accuracy. I don’t ever want anybody to think that I’m selling them snake oil. We make sure that we’re very clear on what those uncertainties are and how speculative it can be sometimes to look out there really far into the future.
Mike Howell (15:55):
Right. And I know it’s hard to predict what’s going on several months out in advance. Our local weather guy can’t get it right for what’s going on tomorrow. I don’t want to put you in the bucket with him.
Eric Snodgrass (16:03):
I’ll get in the bucket with him. That’s fine.
Mike Howell (16:06):
Eric, I know you do a lot of weather forecast and we’re going to try to have you on the show every three months or so and give us a good general update. A lot of these growers that are listening will want to get more information a lot quicker than that. I understand you have some websites and newsletters, that kind stuff. Tell us where they can go to get more information.
Eric Snodgrass (16:23):
Yeah. Absolutely. So we’ve built out a whole suite of weather forecast graphics, both field level all the way up to the globe. In addition to that, we also produce daily reports. I actually send out a report every single morning, goes about 7:30 central time and it just discusses all the major factors over the next few weeks. But I also put in some highlighted stories in there and I design it such that you open it up, read the headlines, if there’s something important you need to look at, you read it. If not, just delete it. I’ll make another one tomorrow. You can read that one, but there’s a few great ways to get signed up for that and I’ll make sure that you have the URL that anybody can use to sign up for it.
(16:57)
But another way to contact me, it’s just email me, it’s just Eric.snodgrass@nutrien.com, so E-R-I-C.S-N-O-D-G-R-A-S-S@nutrien.com, and I can get them hooked up with all of this stuff. And the beauty of it is Nutrien allows me to do this for our customer growers completely for free. It’s a service we’re providing to help keep folks aware of this one and a very important type of risk, which is weather risk.
Mike Howell (17:20):
Okay, that sounds great, Eric. And we’ll put a link on our webpage eKonomics.com, that’s www.nutrien-eKonomics with a K .com, so growers can go there and find more information. We also have some tools on that same website talking about the rainfall calculator. And Eric, you mentioned admirable early on that that was a company you developed and now it’s part of Nutrien. And we are in the process of making a transition to get that weather data to power our rainfall tracker. So if growers are using our rainfall tracker and things like that, that’s going to be the same.
Eric Snodgrass (17:52):
Yep, that’s exactly right. And we try to use the best that there is. One of the great things about the United States, to be honest with you is we got about 4,000 weather stations all over the country that are maintained by the government, and then we have one of the most dense networks of radars. We have 160 of them across the country. So we can take all that information, put it through a quality control process to provide you the best possible estimate of the rainfall. It’ll never beat your own local rain gauge. That’s going to be the perfect, the ground truth there, but we do our best to fill in the gaps.
Mike Howell (18:17):
Well, Eric, we sure appreciate you being with us today. We know there’s nothing we can do about the weather, but hopefully by understanding things a little better, growers can make some better management decisions and be on top of things if these weather conditions come about. Is there anything else you want to share with us today before we wrap it up?
Eric Snodgrass (18:33):
No, I would just say this is great and I’m excited to keep coming back here and talk more about the weather, and I hope that folks that are listening certainly hit me up for the information we’ve got.
Mike Howell (18:42):
Okay, thanks a lot, Eric. We’ll have you back in a few months and get an update. That’ll probably be during the peak of the growing season midsummer somewhere, and we can probably get a harvest outlook by that time.
Eric Snodgrass (18:52):
That sounds good.
Mike Howell (18:54):
Thanks a lot for joining us. And listeners, we want to thank you for being a part of our program today. For more information on any of the topics we talked about today, you can go to www.nutrien-eKonomics with a K .com. As always, we thank you for your participation and if you like our program, give us some feedback. Let us know what we can do to make this better, and always share a link with this with your friends and neighbors. I want to invite everyone to join us again next week when Dr. Antonio Mallarino, agronomist with Iowa State University talks to us about the importance of potassium. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
