'The corn cannibalized itself': How a dry summer walloped southwest Minnesota
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The sun rises above a patch of shriveled corn stalks. Some lack ears; others are blackened. Peter Bakken, a Rock County farmer, walks out from between rows of stalks. He holds two ears of corn. One grew just fine while the other was short and barely developed.
“This ear, this plant just ran out of gas, and that's all it produced,” said Bakken. “The corn cannibalized itself.”
When a corn stalk can’t access the nutrients it needs to grow, it starts to feed on the only other source of food it has: itself.
The resulting stalk is limp, with little strength left to stand. It can die in the process, and even if it doesn’t, it becomes vulnerable to the wind that can snap it over. That patch of Bakken’s corn is a casualty of a drought that’s engulfed southwestern Minnesota.
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Bakken, who also raises cattle, said the grass his cows fed on ran out. Without rain, the pasture didn’t grow back. He had to feed them with reserves he kept for winter.
“We weren't overgrazing. We weren't undergrazing,” said Bakken. “Absolutely unprecedented. We'd never had to do that in my 40 years of farming.” Other area farmers who submitted condition reports to the U.S. Department of Agriculture similarly said they had never or rarely seen drought this bad.
Rock and Pipestone counties faced dry conditions all summer. In late September, the USDA designated them as natural disaster areas.
For farmers, that meant stressful days and tough decisions. Now, as harvest is underway, producers are making one last push to get the crops out of the ground.
Weather worries
Southwestern Minnesota often gets dry during the summer, according to Ben Cathey, chief meteorologist for MPR News. But the region frequently contends with moist, hot summers.
The area produces a lot of corn. During the summer, the corn’s leaves “sweat” out its water content. That vapor adds to how hot and humid the region feels. That likely affected the region’s heat, Cathey said.
“We're not getting a lot hotter on an average daytime high, but the overnight lows are getting warmer,” said Cathey. “If the moisture stays, the temperature can't cool as easily, and so these overnight warm temperatures with high humidity are definitely an impact.”
Minnesota has seen increasing temperatures throughout the years. The state’s southern region has shown an average annual temperature increase of 2.2 degrees.
Cathey said it's not just the heat that has experts worried.
“The increasing spikes in both drought and flood is definitely concerning because as a farmer you want a reliable source of moisture for your plants, or if you're a rancher, you want a reliable source of water for your animals,” said Cathey.
As much as farmers would like regular rainfall during the summer, once harvest starts, that rain is much less welcome. Especially when it pours.
A race against the clock
Soybeans usually boast a bright yellow color in good seasons. But this summer’s drought, toned some of Murray County farmer Bryan Biegler’s beans purple.
He thought that they’d get to harvest them early, considering how dry the summer has been. But then, downpours made him raincheck harvest. Farm equipment doesn’t work well in muddy terrain, and soybeans need to be harvested when they’re dry. However, the late rain brought its own set of problems.
“When we got that wet weather, and it stayed wet for so long, some of the beans started getting a little mold in them,” Biegler said. “There's not a lot of it around here, but I've seen others.”
Some of his own beans have gotten damaged. But not enough for them to be turned away by the local grain elevator. Now, with the sun finally out on a recent Friday in early October, Biegler watches as his farm help fill up trucks with soybeans.
As soon as they’re done, he makes his way to the truck. They need to quickly move the crop to the local grain elevator to sell.
It’s sunny, warm and nice outside; too nice.
“It's warmer right now than what we're used to, and it's maturing the beans along a little bit faster than I was hoping for,” said Biegler.
If the sun dries out the beans too much, they lose their yield — and their value per acre — so Biegler is working around the clock to avoid losses. He’s also hoping to finish harvesting the beans to get to work on his corn. His stalks suffered during the drought and they are brittle in some areas.
“If you get this big hard wind it could start tipping over, and then it gets to be more of a challenge picking it up and getting it harvested,” said Biegler.
He had a rough summer with only two rainfalls this growing season. Still, he’s thankful for the water.
“If we wouldn't have had those, we would have had a lot of dryness then,” said Biegler. “The yields would have really been crap then.”
He expects to lose out on some crop yields this year, but overall, he still expects to reap a decent haul. And despite the tough conditions, other farmers still have hope for a better season next year.
‘Mentally taxing’
Peter Bakken from Rock County has a sticker placed on the door to his shed. It reads, “A healthy farm is nothing without you.” To him, it’s a reminder to be mindful of one’s mental health. Especially after a year as hard as this one.
“I'll be really glad when this year is done because it's just mentally taxing,” said Bakken.
His cattle ran out of feed during the summer once all the grass had been munched on and it couldn’t grow back due to drought. Some of his cows passed away from heat stress. He had to move the rest to a fenced area with dry ground. He said that’s to prevent overgrazing the pasture in an effort to preserve its quality for next year. When rain fell later in the year, his cows had to live with mud beneath their hooves.
Usually, he would only have to focus on the day-to-day needs of his operation, knowing rain would eventually come.
“But when those things don't happen, then your mind goes to thinking to the future of ‘how am I going to manage this if I don't have water, or if I don't have grass, or if I don't have feed,’” said Bakken.
His animals were Bakken’s top priority. Their care took precedence over taking care of himself. Each day passed with him clinging on to hope that rain would come back or that the heat would relent.
“When we went from 95 degrees down to 80 degrees. It was like a huge blessing because the relief from the heat was like,’ oh, we finally got through it,’” Bakken said. “But every day watching the forecast was disheartening in the fact that ‘man, it's going to be 95 degrees again today.’”
Bakken points to the fields of green surrounding his farm. It’s grass that sprouted after feeding from the rain. The sight fills him back up with optimism.
His gaze falls on the cows he’s taken care of this whole year.
“You can watch the cattle as it cools off and how much happier they are,” Bakken said. “They, like us farmers, are a resilient breed.”
Special thanks to Danger Boat Productions and the Minnesota Humanities Center for their Sketches of Minnesota events around the state that helped inform this report.
