Read Full Transcript
Mike Howell (00:08):
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, news and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38):
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. We’ve got a familiar guest back with us today. We’ve got Eric Snodgrass. Eric, if you will, before we get started, remind our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Eric Snodgrass (00:49):
Again, my name is Eric and I am a Nutrien Senior Science Fellow. Spent a lot of my time doing weather analysis and forecasting for our customer growers as well as for our internal folks. And my job is to try to figure out what risk weather’s going to pose, both now and in the future, but also take a deep look at what’s happened in the past so we can understand better what the future’s going to be. So I spend most of my days just staring at weather maps, trying to figure out what’s next.
Mike Howell (01:12):
Well Eric, we appreciate you taking time to be with us. I know you’re really busy. The last few weeks, weather has been all over the headlines in the news. There was a hurricane that came into California and Nevada area and we don’t ever hear about that. And then the incidents with the Burning Man Festival, I believe it was, I don’t know a lot about that, but I know there was quite a storm that came through there. And then we had the Hurricane Idalia in Florida. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with all these hurricanes and strange weather patterns.
Eric Snodgrass (01:39):
By the time you get into late August or early September, you’re mixing together the end of a thunderstorm season and the beginning of the hurricane season, at least the peak of the hurricane season. So it is rare to have a tropical system get pulled into California, but that’s what Hillary did. Got pulled through California and Nevada. In fact, we even saw some of the moisture from Hillary getting all the way into the Canadian prairies. But the only reason why that happened was because if you remember during that week that Hillary was hitting the West coast, we had a big ridge of high pressure in that part of the country. So it just sat there and spun around in a clockwise fashion, pulling all that woosh from Hillary North. Some places inside of a two-week window there saw 3000% of normal precipitation, but the flooding was mainly confined to a few different regions and it certainly didn’t hit the same area that this past weekend’s flooding hit in Nevada, causing all of those folks out there at the Burning Man Festival to get stranded.
(02:29):
When you’re in a dry lake bed and all of a sudden it rains, it’s going to turn into some serious mud. So that was an unfortunate setup for those folks out there. A lot of people got stranded for a while. I imagine some folks are still trying to get out of it even as we record today. And then what happened in between, we had a Idalia. Idalia came up off of the West Coast, Cuba and National Hurricane Centre nailed this forecast. They did a phenomenal job, came in at 5:30 in the morning along the East coast or 6:30 in the morning, East Coast time and then left 12 hours later, and along the way dumped six to 10 inches of rain. And while all that’s been going on, we’ve got places in the century United States that didn’t measure a drop of rain. It’s really one of those situations where mother nature is not being very equitable with the way she’s distributing the water here in this late summer timeframe.
Mike Howell (03:11):
We’ll talk a little bit more about the dry weather in just a second, Eric, but while we’re talking about hurricanes, I looked at my weather app this morning and it looks like we’ve got a string of storms out there in the Atlantic. We’ve got Gert and Katina and the new one, number 13, and they are predicting that one could be a bad one. Talk a little bit about those and where they may end up heading.
Eric Snodgrass (03:30):
Yeah, so Gert’s done. He’s just going to sit and spin in the North Atlantic. It’s not even really being observed much. And the other one you mentioned was Katya. Katya was actually the name that was put on the list after we retired Hurricane Katrina after 2005, so that’s how that name got on there. But again, it’s out there, spinning around, not really made factor. The big one was this morning, the renaming of what was once just an area we investigating called it Invest 95L, but it got bumped up to Tropical Depression 13. It is expected to very quickly become a hurricane and a powerful one at that. It’ll get the name Lee if it’s the next one line here. There’s also a little area off the west coast of Africa we got to keep an eye on too, but I think the one that’s out ahead of it, the one you mentioned, tropical depression, 13, it’ll get the name first, so it’ll be Lee and it’s heading just north of the Lesser Antilles.
(04:15):
And so folks along the east coast are watching that one carefully because should it get close to the east coast, it could be at that point a major hurricane. There’s a lot of warm water still there and something that we have to contend with. But based off what I know today when we’re recording this, I think that that system is going to struggle against some stronger winds coming off the East coast and has a lower probability of hitting, but I didn’t say a zero probability, just at a lower and we’ll watch it evolve all week to see if it becomes a threatening system for the eastern coast of the United States.
Mike Howell (04:45):
And I’ll remind everybody we’re recording this about a week before it’s going to go live, so don’t take our word for what this one’s going to do. We’ll definitely be late to the game by the time our listeners hear this one, but it is out there and something we need to keep an eye on.
(05:01):
Now, Eric, you started mentioning the drought a little earlier and last year it seems like that’s all we could talk about was the drought across the middle part of the country and it seems to me like that drought is still there, maybe moved a little bit to the east this year and it’s definitely taken its toll here in South Mississippi. I saw a report the other day that the 1st of September, we were 27 inches below average on our rainfall this year and all of my pastures are dead. We’re having to feed the hay to the cattle. A lot of the ponds are already dry and people are hauling water in just to keep the cows alive. So what’s going on with the drought and when can we see an end to this maybe?
Eric Snodgrass (05:35):
Well, from southern Mississippi over to Texas, you would not believe the number of people that have sent me an email saying they’re praying for a hurricane, because a hurricane, slow mover, not producing terrible winds. It’s just to bring it back to where it should be in terms of water because we’ve had such a devastating year for drought. And remember this follows an incredible drought in Texas last year. So you think about the whole drought picture, we’ve got it really in I’d say four places. Pacific Northwest is dry, big section of the upper Mississippi Basin is dry, the south is dry from Texas all the way over to southern Mississippi, and then there’s a pocket in the mid-Atlantic over there by Virginia that’s dry right now, but down south where you are, I mean, it’s not just dry, it’s record dry.
(06:15):
I mean, you understand, we’ve got 131 years worth of data and you look back over this past summer and look at where it ranks, it’s number one, driest that we’ve ever seen in that area, so just incredible. I j.ust want to remind you what can’t happen back in 2020, Louisiana, Southern Mississippi got hit by five separate hurricanes. We got to be careful what we wish for here because sometimes the atmosphere can come on in full revenge.
Mike Howell (06:36):
That’s right.
Eric Snodgrass (06:37):
But the drought in the upper Mississippi Basin is something I’m watching carefully too, and the reason for that is that’s the area that feeds into the Missouri, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and the soil moisture, there’s very low. It did affect corn and soybeans as they were trying to finish in August, probably more affecting the soybeans and some of the corn, but it did have an impact and right now the Mississippi is pretty low. So at Memphis, I just looked this morning, a year ago, we were at three and a half feet below low level. We’re currently almost six feet below low level. Remember by the time it got into October a year ago, it was 12 feet below low level and they were shutting down barge traffic. If we don’t get some rain across that basin soon, we could run that same risk again of having the inability to move stuff up and down our biggest and most important resource frag in the United States, which is the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
Mike Howell (07:23):
That’s something we’re tuned into and hoping we get some rain to keep that river full. We did a podcast several weeks ago about the importance of the Mississippi River to agriculture and want to encourage everybody to go back and take a listen to that if you missed that episode. Eric, I keep getting updates on my computer every day. We talked about the drought, but another thing that’s going on is the record heat. We have had, I can’t tell you how many days in a row of over a hundred degree temperatures down here. That’s something we don’t see down here. We’ll get into the mid to upper nineties, but when it starts getting over a hundred for many consecutive days, that’s really unusual.
Eric Snodgrass (07:55):
It’s unusual because in order for you to get over a hundred, you have to be hot and dry. The reason why you rarely get out of that is because your humidity levels are too high and you tend to make clouds, you tend to make storms and it just ruins the chance for the temperatures to crank up over a hundred. But shoot, earlier this year we saw in New Orleans, they had 104 degrees Fahrenheit and you just look all across the south. It has been record hot. It’s record hot, record dry. If you want me to tell you what it looks like in the past, I can’t. This is it. This is the new number one in terms of hot and dry it’s been. Now meanwhile, just to make you feel bad about it, we had a frost this morning in Nevada. There was a frost a week ago in the UP of Michigan, and even in those areas, we’ve seen the temperatures fluctuate a lot.
(08:35):
You joked before we got on here, I’m wearing a jacket today. We’ve got cloud cover and storms trying to get in here and we’ve had some overnight lows down in the fifties up in the Midwest, and our bouts with heat have only lasted five, six days before they back off, but the Southern United States has had no relief. In fact, I think you can look back and probably see that you’ve had some form of a heat advisor, heat watcher, heat warning every day since I’d guess the end of June. I think it’s been on that long for you all.
Mike Howell (09:00):
Yeah, it sure seems like it. Very little relief even when we get a chance of rain. Last weekend, Labour Day weekend, we were supposed to be a total washout and we got less than a 10th of an inch here so been a tough summer.
(09:13):
Let’s move on from that and it’s harvest season. I was in Illinois last week. I drove up from Mississippi and through the South Delta there’s a lot of corn that’s already been harvested. Beans are probably being harvested this week and as you move north it’s not going to be far behind. I even saw a little bit of corn being harvested even in Illinois last week. Let’s talk about the conditions as we get into harvest. What kind of challenges could we be seeing? Are we going to have great weather conditions for harvest season?
Eric Snodgrass (09:37):
What’s sad is sometimes great weather conditions for harvest season is not good for other things. What I mean by that is we want the crop to dry down on the ground. We don’t want to have it dry down at the elevator and therefore three, four, five weeks of real dry weather and we’re pretty happy. We can get in whenever we want. The windows are not tight, but at the same time, that’s what killed the Mississippi last year and I hate to say it, but we got to balance the good with the bad right now and the bad is that there are some drier risks throughout the Midwest and throughout the south, but I mean we’ve always got the wild card of our hurricane, which we just can’t predict out that far. There’s some decent moisture that’s going to try to get into the central plains, but parts of the Midwest are going to be struggling I think for a little while here in September.
(10:16):
Now that being said, we have an El Nino Brewing and El Ninos are notorious for flipping patterns at the end of September, at the beginning of October, bringing them in much wetter and much cooler. So we got to watch out for that because if we end up tightening up those harvest windows, the good side of it is it’s tightening up because of the wetter weather and we need that to fill those rivers back up and recover the soil moisture before it freezes up here in the northern parts of the US. But the bad thing is we start to really slow down this harvest with that.
(10:44):
I’m going to tell you the one thing I can guarantee about September and October is they’re both transition months. They’re seasonal transition months, which means the weather in one week doesn’t correlate to the weather in the next week, and I do not see anything right now that tells me that the pattern is stuck in one configuration. I think we’re going to see a lot of volatility, which means unlike a year ago, we’re just got stuck in dry and nonstop dry. I think this year we’ve got a little bit different story ahead of us with maybe some better moisture coming in, but it’s at the expense of closing up those harvest windows.
Mike Howell (11:13):
Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to complain about getting some moisture back in. It’s going to be tough to get through the winter for a lot of these cattle guys if we don’t get some rain, especially down here along the Gulf coast pretty soon. So Eric, what about other parts of the planet? What about Europe? Any updates or anything going on around Europe that we need to be aware of?
Eric Snodgrass (11:32):
This past weekend here, Labour Day weekend, we had a major storm system roll right through Central Europe and got all the way down to Greece and dumped 500 millimetres of rainfall. Just a tonne of rain there. Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, the Russian wheat belt dry. We’ve missed out on some of these recent rains. Europe’s not really been that big of a story this particular year. It’s stormed at the right times and some places we’ve been dealing with too much rain. There was some drought early in the growing season in Spain, but that heat and that drought broke and so we’re not hearing too much about it anymore.
(12:02):
But you asked the global question. I think the big thing that’s not just impacting Europe, but the rest of the planet is we had this El Nino cranking right now. And you mentioned a moment ago about winter and you may ask me again about it in a minute, but I’ll tell you something. If you thought summer was dry, you’re going to think of the same magnitude of weather events happening on the wet side for winter down south. We expect all of your drought worries to be gone by the time we get into March because of what this winter might deliver. So I’ll throw all that on the table and see what you want to ask me about now.
Mike Howell (12:31):
Well, I’ve always heard since I was a little fella that one extreme follows another. So you just set that up really nicely. So am I assuming it’s going to be a long wet cold winter?
Eric Snodgrass (12:40):
Well, El Nino would tell you that your chances of that happening are the highest they can be in a preseason forecast. El Nino tends to crank up the subtropical jet stream. That’s the one that starts in Hawaii, hits California, Mexico goes into Texas, and then eventually races across the south and heads on up to the east coast. And if the jet stream’s going to do that, all the weather will follow it. So you tend to be a little cooler, more cloudy and wetter. Good news is we’ve recovered from droughts. Bad news is that it’s just a miserable winter for the most part, but as I’m sure you also heard when you were young, miserable winters lead to great springs. So let’s hope that we could get that out of this one as it comes across the United States this winter.
Mike Howell (13:20):
Okay, Eric. Well, we’ve talked about the weather here at home. What about south of the equator? I know there’s some stuff going on in South America, the Panama Canal. What all is happening in that part of the world?
Eric Snodgrass (13:29):
Let’s start in the Panama Canal. We saw a pretty big drought on a lake that’s in the middle of the Panama Canal. If you want to cross the Atlantic to the Pacific, you come with these narrow canals that are both right by the coastline because in the middle there’s a big lake that everybody flows through. That lake was low, which means they had a difficult time getting the locks and dams at the right heights to get the boats through. So there’s still a pretty big global shipping backup right there in the Panama Canal right now. And I just looked at it this morning and there’s still a lot of ships all lined up there. In fact, there’s so many we can look down from satellite and see the little specs in the ocean. Each one of them is a ship waiting to get going.
(14:02):
But farther south from there, this is going to be the mainstay of our market movement over our winter timeframe here in the summer in South America, and that is we’ve seen some folks getting granted an early release on planting. Normally they can’t start planting soybeans in Brazil until September 15th. Some folks got to start planning on September 1st. They did that because there was some risk with the El Nino that the second season or the crop could be struggling with some drought and it wasn’t the normal disease pressures that they typically get at the end of their dry season, so they went after it. But the majority of people in South America are waiting on a good rain to come in before they can start planting. They want about two inches of rain to get into the soil before they even start to turn a planter over and get things going.
(14:46):
There is an El Nino, which means Southern Brazil and Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, those are all the southern growing areas in South America, they tend to have less drought risk. For the last three years, those areas have been under major drought risk. Where the drought risk comes in is a bit farther north in Brazil. But remember the Brazilian monsoon is so strong that it can deliver four to five inches of rain a week sometimes in central and northern Brazil. But even if they have a pullback, let’s say it pulls back two inches a week, they’re still getting three inches of rainfall, which means it’s pretty rare for a large drought to have a massive impact on Brazil, especially their soybean crop, which goes in first. But it’s all going to be about planting base. So our markets will reacted the speed at which they plant and the total acres they’re expected to plant.
(15:28):
And unlike a year ago where they added about 6 million to 7 million acres, which by the way, that’s like half of an Illinois soybean crop that they just added last year, we’re not expecting them to go so aggressive after acres this year primarily because of where commodity prices are and how much grain they’re storing currently. But if they get the crop in on time, it’s going to make sure that the US markets are left out of the global picture. We like it when they’re delayed with planting because our markets covered the difference, tends to give us a little bump in our fall prices, which is right about the time we harvest. Anybody that takes their grain right out of the field to the elevator tends to do better those years.
(16:03):
But I think at this year, Brazil is using all the moves that we use whenever the commodity cycle is down in order to ensure that those prices don’t continue to plummet. So don’t expect such big acres this year as they did last year. It’ll still be big but not as big as last year. Overall, we think Argentina will be back online for production. That means Brazil doesn’t have to cover them like they did a year ago. So that’s a mouthful, but those are the things I’m watching down there in South America right now.
Mike Howell (16:30):
Okay, Eric, well last year everybody in Australia was really happy with you. Seems like you just gave them perfect weather forecast. Are they still happy or have things changed down there as well?
Eric Snodgrass (16:40):
It’s changed. I had invitations to come speak. In fact, I had an invitation to go live down there for two years and work with folks down there and that’s all gone quiet now because El Nino poses a significant dry risk for them and the Bureau of Meteorology, that’s what they call their National Weather Service in Australia, they have been extremely aggressive on forecasting the strength of this upcoming El Nino event, and they are calling it to be over three degrees warmer than normal. So just for reference, that would make this El Nino stronger than the one we had in 15-16, 97-98, and 82-83. And those are the three big dogs right there.
(17:15):
If it does come in like they are suggesting, we would be looking at, I mean, substantial drought risk across Australia. They’re worried about that. That would be their summer, our winter, and they don’t want any of their winter crops which need that rain at the very end to finish. They don’t want to see drought coming in on that land. So they listen, but they’re no longer as happy as they were with me before when I was giving them all sorts of good news all the time with three years of La Niña.
Mike Howell (17:39):
Right. Well, it can’t be perfect all the time. They have to have the good with the bad just like everybody else. Hate to see anybody have the bad times, but I guess after three years it’s their turn to have a bad one, isn’t it?
Eric Snodgrass (17:50):
I guess so. Somebody’s turn right.
Mike Howell (17:52):
Eric, I think we’ve pretty much went around the globe already today. Is there anything that we’ve missed, anything else out there we need to talk about?
Eric Snodgrass (17:59):
I think what’s most important for us to watch, again, just to reiterate a couple of things, we need to see some moisture recovery in the Central US. We’ve gone back up on the drop monitor. I’d love to see it reduced by over 40% by the time we get into spring. We’re going to watch that. Keep a close eye on Western US Snowpack this winter, that’s going to be critical for their water issues. And we need to eliminate the drought that’s spread in the south into the Midwest. And I think a good rule of thumb is a real nasty winter, which is maybe what we’re expecting this year, can often turn into a phenomenal spring. So let’s keep our hopes where they line up with a good spring there in the background and doer this winter together.
Mike Howell (18:32):
Okay, Eric, well, we sure appreciate you taking time to visit with us today. Well, listeners, as you know, it’s now time that we move into our second segment where we talk about somebody famous in agriculture.
(18:44):
Now, today we’ve been talking a lot about the weather and we wanted to talk a little bit today about Harriett Strong. Harriett was an American social activist, an inventor, a businesswoman, and a conservationist, and a leading figure of the early women’s movement. She’s been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Her pioneering inventions in water storage and flood control actually enabled the construction of the Hoover Dam and the all-American Canal. Now, Harriet was born in Buffalo, New York. She was one of four daughters and she was educated by private teachers at Young Ladies Seminary in California. She later moved to Carson City, Nevada where she met her future husband, Charles Strong. They were married in Virginia City when she was 19, and at the age of 39, she was left a widow with four daughters when her husband committed suicide after a series of bad business failures.
(19:34):
She then devoted her attention to management and development of this estate in San Gabriel Valley, California. It was largely planted with walnut and orange trees as well as pompous grass and yielded profitable returns. In 1897, she drilled a number of artesian wells and to utilize the water, she purchased a thousand acres of land about five miles away. She installed a pumping plant and incorporated the property under the name of Paso De Bartolo Water Company. She was president of this until she sold it about four years later. Now Harriett Strong made a study about water shortages in the area, including flood control, floodwaters, and water storage.
(20:12):
She advocated source conservation as a flood remedy, proposing succession of dams in the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River to conserve water for irrigation purposes and the generation of electricity. In December of 1887, she was granted a patent for a dam and reservoir construction, and her invention consisted of a series of dams, one behind the other to be constructed in a valley or canyon in such a way that when the water had filled the lower dam, it would extend to a certain point on the upper dam and actually serve to reinforce the second dam. She obtained another patent in 1894 on a new method of impounding debris and storing water.
(20:50):
She was awarded two medals for these inventions by the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893. In 1890, she appeared before the Congressional Committee on Water Power and urged the government to store floodwaters of the Colorado River by constructing a series of dams by her method in the Grand Canyon. Thus control floods and increase irrigation, making available thousands of acres of land and unlimited power for generating electricity. We want to give a shout-out today to Harriet Strong for her contributions to water storage and irrigation in the western part of the United States.
(21:25):
Listeners, for any information on today’s topics or anything else related to fertility or agronomy, we invite you to check out our website. That’s nutrien-ekonomics with a K .com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
