Saturated soil leaves 'tight planting windows' for farmers

Flooding threat persists despite warm winter

A farm field and crop storage facility weather the winter in McLean County. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

Illinois farmers face “tight planting windows” this spring, as saturated soil is widespread in spite of the relatively mild winter.

Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford warned at the end of February that “the soils across the region pretty much from the southern Midwest up into the Dakotas are very very wet, at or near saturation.” Since then, warm weather has helped dry out the soil, but it remains saturated in the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys, with the threat of flooding if heavy rains hit like last year.

That’s according to Eric Snodgrass, principal atmospheric scientist for Nutrien Ag Solutions. who told an Indiana agriculture meeting last week, “There’s a surplus of water in the Mississippi River valley. It still has to drain, which is going to compromise low-lying ground.

“If we have an event like last year,” such as a a 3- to 5-inch rain in March, “we’ll have another flood,” he added in a story published Monday on the FarmWeekNow.com website. “If we have no precipitation (this month), it will still take about six weeks to drain away.”

According to the Illinois State Water Survey, the state enjoyed the 12th-warmest climatological winter on record, from December through February, with an average temperature of 32.6 degrees, including a warm burst at the beginning of February that saw 115 records set for local high temperatures, with Charleston hitting 70 on Feb. 3, and another dozen records set for highest low temperatures recorded.

Snodgrass pointed out that three-quarters of the days so far this year have seen above-normal temperatures.

Yet, according to FarmWeekNow, precipitation across the state so far this year averaged 4.4 inches in January (ninth-wettest on record) and 2.1 inches in February, just above normal, with Cairo, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, hit with the most precipitation in the state last month, at 7.3 inches. The story added that the state has seen a persistent increase in average rainfall as a result of climate change, pointing out that “average rainfall from March through May in Illinois increased about 2.2 inches in the past 71 years while the frequency of 2-plus-inch rain events doubled.”

“We’re likely to see conditions continue to get wetter and wetter” in the Midwest, Snodgrass warned. “I don’t think spring 2020 will be like spring 2019. But, even if spring is normal, we could still have tight planting windows.”

“Even if it is drier than normal over the next few weeks, the colder-than-normal temperatures mean that evaporation from that soil is pretty limited,” Ford told RFD Radio last month. “So, it is likely that the moisture we have in that soil is going to be there come late March and early April.

“Moving forward,” he added, “I think the most worrying things are those very wet soils.”