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Five plus years of dryness and climatologist says not much relief on the way

A climatologist says there’s not much relief in the forecast for ag producers who have been facing multiple years of drought conditions. 

Brian Fuchs is with the National Drought Mitigation Center. “There are places in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska that over the last four to five years they’ve missed out on an entire year’s worth of precipitation.”

He tells Brownfield the last time those areas received significant moisture was in 2019. “Since 2019, which was just a tremendously wet year, it’s been consistently dry in some of these same areas that were impacted by those floods back then. It’s one thing to monitor the week in and week out changes, but when you start digging into the data, those signals do light up.”

Fuchs says there’s been some improvement in parts of Missouri. “But boy, there just really is a quick transition line in Central Missouri as you go north and west of there. Just this pocket that’s been dry consistently now for several years.”

Fuchs says the drought outlook into June shows drought conditions intensifying across the Western Corn Belt.