NYT reports:
“We don’t have any record of anything like this happening before,” said Mark Schilling, the director of the Corn Palace, a campy, 114-year-old landmark promoted on highway billboards with endless corn puns.
“But if there’s not a crop, there’s not a crop,” Mr. Schilling said quietly.
After weeks and weeks with little rain and high temperatures, one farmer, Terry Goehring, watched the mercury spike to 118 degrees in his Mound City, S.D., field one day in July. That was it. Mr. Goehring, who has farmed since 1978, sold half his 250 head of Angus cattle.
“There was no corn,” he said. “There was no hay. We had nothing. And in that moment, I knew there was no choice.”
Climatologists with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said scientists deemed the weather conditions and its effects in the areas of the worst drought a once-in-50-years experience.
In some cases, it has been worse than that. On July 15, a weather station in Perkins County, S.D., near North Dakota, recorded a temperature of 120 degrees. That matched the highest ever reported in the state since the start of such record-keeping in July 1936, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the Nebraska center.
Given such conditions, it is hardly a surprise that crop estimates are so gloomy. Steve Noyes, deputy director at the South Dakota field office of the government’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the winter wheat crop here had shrunk by 43 percent from last year’s; alfalfa hay is expected to be down by 35 percent; and 22 percent of pasture land is deemed “very short,” with 35 percent “short,” figures significantly worse than those of a year ago.
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