As the month of October creeps along, it is becoming more apparent that the predictions of light scattered showers are not going to materialize. This can create a situation where, with the very dry soils and hard ground, farmers are going to have questions about a number of cropping things.

In no particular order those would be:

No. 1. How much can we trust the soil test results when the ground is so dry?

No. 2: If the proper application of anhydrous ammonia is dependent on having moisture in the soil, what sort of moisture level is too dry?

No. 3: Might the dry conditions which showed up right after the flooding have limited the microbial degradation of certain herbicides which have proven to be prone to cause damage to follow crops?

No. 4: Final yield results from this year showed the earlier than normal application of nitrogen to warmer than normal soils led to losses of nitrogen which required supplemental of some stabilized forms of nitrogen to produce decent yields. There were many very yellow fields of corn in western Iowa that never did green up. The application of products like Envita, one from Dakota Ag and BioGreen, which had multiple species of nitrogen fixers in them, showed great value.

In my last article I mentioned the 91-year Gleissberg Wolfgang drought cycle. It has only been perfectly accurate since the 1400s. The commonly mentioned drought cycle is called the Benner Cycle.

Normally we have seen shortfalls in yields in the Northern Hemisphere be countered by large harvests in the Southern Hemisphere. I learned from a Brazilian friend who was the deputy director of The International Plant Nutrition Institute and is now the extension agronomist for Auburn University. He led a tour group of producers, agronomists and entomologists through the Midwest in mid-July. Eros told me about the flooding that took place six or eight months ago in southern Brazil. It rivaled the flooding seen in North Carolina last month. Whole towns, farmsteads, grain storage facilities and lots of top soil were washed away. In addition to that flooding, they were experiencing drought conditions in other parts of the country.

If none of the tiles are running this fall or next spring, how does a person respond crop management wise? Proceed as normal but maximize rain retention via no, strip or minimal tillage?

We know that well mineralized crops get by with less rainfall. We also know that different genetic families have deeper and more expansive root systems. The research results and review papers state that an application of RedoxBioNutrient Compaany’s Calcium silicate increases water use efficiency by 36 percent. I would consider lining up my supply early.

In marginal corn-growing country to our west, planting yellow grain sorghum may make more sense where aquifer supplies are limited. For years the grain was priced at 75 cents to $1 less than yellow No. 2. But with the Mexican increased, non-GMO grain demand increasing for yellow or white milo was carrying a nice premium of $.75 Bu.

I am sure that a lot of Midwest farmers would like to visit with Elwynn, but ISU climatologists are typically told don’t rock the boat with your predictions. Even now I am expecting to see our current surplus of grain disappearing as feeders recognize their need to lock in feed supplies while they are relatively cheap.

So how are producers who understand the normal urgency to lock up input supplies early supposed to respond? Not everyone can or wants to wait until the last minute. And in many cases, inventories of many products were forecast and produced with ingredients procured two years earlier.

The most accurate answers to these questions would come from someone who would now would be 95 or 190 years old. The only things that can relate what they have seen or lived through that story are — the trees with their tree rings. Hmmm.