August rain relieves some growers’ drought fears

Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that Northern Colorado was so dry that Gov. Bill Ritter decided to add Weld County to a list of 22 Colorado counties seeking federal drought relief?

Crops in the region were starting to look, well, stressed by the unrelenting heat and dry conditions that had been defining the sizzling Summer of 2008.

Then came the rains of Aug. 14-17, a three-day-plus period of lovely, drenching, soaking moisture that may have been a lifesaver for many farmers who were watching their corn, sugar beets and other water-dependent crops beginning to wither.

“It was a multi-million bushel event,´ said Mark Sponsler, CEO of Greeley-based Colorado Corn. “With the heat and dryness before that, things were looking very difficult.”

Sponsler said the timing of the downpour could have come “a week or two earlier” to have had an even more profound impact on the region’s corn crop yield “but it still came in time to make a very good difference.”

Nolan Doesken, a state climatologist based at Colorado State University, said the rainfall varied considerably across the region with the least falling near the foothills and the most falling farther east in Weld County.

And the rain changed previous conditions in the area “quite a lot,” Doesken said. “For our immediate area it was more than two and a half inches, more than we usually get in all of August.”

Doesken said rainfall in Northern Colorado ranged from about two inches in the Loveland area to more than four inches north of Greeley. Wellington and Fort Collins also received in the four-inch range, he said.

Prior to the Aug. 14-17 rain, the area had been about three and a half inches below normal precipitation for the May-through-July period, Doesken said.

He said the storm – and several cooler days that followed – “single-handedly” pulled the region out of a downward slide toward a serious and costly summer drought that had been a depressing expectation for many.

Sponsler said the rain came at one of two critical times in corn’s growth cycle, the first being in the spring when the rapidly growing plant is developing its potential yield, and the second being during its reproductive stage.

“That (reproductive period) had been ongoing for a few weeks but we’re still in that stage,” he said. “So absolutely, it was an incredibly valuable rain event coming at a really critical time in the corn life cycle.”

Sponsler said the storm will increase yields in most cornfields but the result will vary from field to field. “It was definitely good timing, but knowing how much of a net change it means would involve knowing how much (the corn) was stressed before the reproductive stage.”

A total of 1.3 million acres were planted with corn in Colorado this year, Sponsler said, and the Department of Agriculture had predicted a total state yield of 175 million bushels before the rain.

Sponsler said dryland corn, which is not irrigated and depends on rainfall earlier in the summer to grow, would likely not benefit from the storm because it was already too stressed. But he said that only accounts for about 10 percent of the state’s crop and that loss would be more than offset by increased yields in irrigated fields.

Meanwhile, the USDA was predicting a week before the storm that the nation’s corn crop was on course to be the second-largest in history at 12.3 billion bushels. The report noted that good weather in the Midwest this summer had blunted damage received in some fields during June flooding.

Still, Sponsler said a good crop has its disadvantages for growers, as a huge harvest in October will likely depress prices for the commodity. He said corn prices should probably average around $5 a bushel, down considerably from the $8 price seen just after the floods.

Sugar beets also benefit

Sugar beets, another of the region’s water-dependent crops, are also benefiting from the recent rainfall. Kent Wimmer, director of shareholder relations for Denver-based Western Sugar Cooperative, said the Northern Colorado crop is looking pretty good after a shaky start.

“We had a very difficult spring this year – cold, wet and windy – and had to replant 20 percent of the Northern Colorado crop, and we ended up losing about 15 percent of that,” he said.

But Wimmer noted that once the beets were successfully planted they enjoyed six to eight weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, which in beets “turns sunshine into energy.”

Wimmer said the cooperative – which includes 135,000 acres in four states – had been projecting a yield of over 25 tons per acre in Northern Colorado where about 350 growers are tending about 10,000 acres.

The recent rain should help improve that. “Rain is good and will be utilized very efficiently by the beets,” he said.

The region’s other major crop – wheat – is also doing well but not as good as last year. The Colorado winter wheat crop harvest ended in late July, and the USDA estimated a 56-million-bushel yield based on 2 million acres harvested with an average statewide yield of 28 bushels per acre.

That compares to 94 million bushels produced in 2007 based on 2.35 million acres harvested with an average statewide yield of 40 bushels per acre.

And while the Aug. 14-17 precipitation was basically a good thing, there’s always a downside it seems. Some local specialty growers, like Grant’s Family Farms north of Fort Collins, got beat up pretty badly by the hail that fell on Aug. 14 while some onion growers saw their bagged crops drenched and rotted by the rain.

As usual in the ag game, you win some and you lose some.   

Steve Porter covers agribusiness for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 225, or at sporter@ncbr.com.

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