We have a new farmer to introduce in our series
Donnie Nelson
Donnie lives near Keene, North Dakota and owns a farming/ranching operation. He farms multiple crops including wheat, oats, barley, canola, field peas, mustard, and corn. He’s been farming and ranching for over 30 years and lives with his wife and granddaughter.
“The current weather situation is tough. It’s hard to find a parallel in the past so it’s hard to know what’s going to happen. There’s nothing in my lifetime like it. I went through 1988 which is considered probably one of the worst drought years in history in our area. Most people think the record drought years were set in the 30s, but in reality there were some really bad years in the 80s. 1988 was so dry that I had to hay or graze most of my crops, I can’t compare it to any other year. Until 3 years ago and it happened again with drought and then last year lost 1/2 of the crop to excessive moisture in harvest which never happened to me before.
-Donnie Nelson
“Last year’s flooding was bad but last week I had the worst rain event I’ve ever seen. (Jul 1st, 2020) Over 10 inches of rain fell in one night. I’ve seen as much rain before, but never in one night. It busted through some really poorly engineered divides between the basins . In North Dakota if you’re unlucky enough to live in a small basin with only a few townships, and get a lot of rain, and they don’t allow enough for disaster declarations that would trigger an agricultural disaster; so basically now we just rely on the crop insurance everybody agreed to a couple farm bills ago. But at the 65 percent indemnity level in enterprise units,(all of that one crop in a county) which is what most farmers have, then minus the premium, there isn’t much left. Slowly in each successive farm bill the crop insurance has become pared down, so that the insurance companies get the federal subsidy, while the insurance companies shrink their indemnities to the farmer. The Crop Insurance Title in the Farm bills was supposed to replace the need for disaster programs, but it’s ended up to be just another federal subsidy to big insurance companies. There needs to be reform, again.”
-Todd Leake, Emerado, ND
“When you farm for a long time you realize that every year has its own weather pattern and unusual characteristics that go with it. 2019 gave us a wet, cold April that set us back and shortened the growing season. We pushed hard in May and planted about 85 percent of our corn by mid-month. Then it got too wet again and we had to stop planting for about 10 days. That first corn needed to be dried and had some quality issues, but the price discounts were small, the yield was good and we did OK with it. The corn planted later on was much lighter and wetter, the yield was off, and the price discounts were big. Looking back, it looks like we should have avoided the input costs and just not planted those acres at the end of May.”
-Jim Dotzenrod, Wyndmere, ND
The quotes above are not unusual in the state of North Dakota. Farming is an occupation that is extremely reliant on nature to provide adequate rain, heat, and access to the fields to harvest crops. Most risks that farmers face come from nature, one night of hail can damage a perfect crop, too little or too much rain will damage crops making them unharvestable or worthless. The perfect crop can be unreachable if the field is too wet. A crop can’t be planted because spring rains or flooding prevented the farmer from getting into the field. In the past five years North Dakota weather has experienced these events
“A friend of mine knows a 105-year-old retired farmer and asked him if he had ever seen a fall like 2019 and he said no. He had heard 1916 was worse but he was too young at the time to notice himself how bad it was.”
-Bill Hejl, Amenia, ND
Drought Hits ND
In 2017, North Dakota experienced record and near-record-low surface soil moisture before and during the growing season. A severe drought hit North Dakota and stayed for about a year and a half in most counties. 99.98 percent of North Dakota counties experienced some sort of dryness or drought. Wildfires peppered the landscape over the last 5 years and many western counties place strict burning regulations to keep fires under control. The Little Missouri Grassland National park had a wildfire in 2017 that destroyed 5,400 acres of grassland. Ranchers were hardest hit out west with loss of hay bales and forage materials. In response the USDA authorized the use of CRP land in June of 2017 with no penalty to save thousands of cattle from starving in western North Dakota. The dry conditions continued to persist until 2018 in the western half of the state.
You can read about the drought conditions on North Dakota Here.
The rain came back in 2019, but it came at extremely inopportune times. Planting season was affected by wet cold weather and in late 2019 North Dakota experienced a rare occurrence of fall flooding. Farmers were devastated by wet fields that made it almost impossible to bring machinery. In addition to the flooding A snow storm in October buried crops making them inaccessable.
Agricultural Commissioner Doug Goehring was quoted saying that about 2 billion dollars’ worth of soybeans were sitting in water or unreachable. Governor Doug Burgum declared a statewide disaster for flood emergencies. In 2019, North Dakota had a total of about 830,600 acres of prevented planting, the 10th most in the United States, according to USDA. Early estimates by the USDA are showing that eastern North Dakota will have around 20% of it’s acreage unplanted but official numbers haven’t been released at the time of writing this article. The USDA estimated that 50% of corn was unharvested in North Dakota as of Jan 20, 2020 and soybean fields across the state were flooded.
‘I just finished harvesting my corn that I planted last year in July. I had to finally give up the last patch of it because my field was too wet again because we got 5 inches of rain. The corn I harvested was generally lower quality. I had one variety I planted that was almost worthless but the other one was pretty close to being normal corn despite being in the field all winter. Unfortunately, all those acres I harvested last week are acres that won’t get planted this year. They’re all sitting there idle and that’s income I’m losing this fall.“
–Travis Anderson, Warwick, ND
A larger problem looms.
Climate events in the US cost over 1 billion dollars (adjusted for 2020 inflation) NOAA
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) In the United States, in the past 5 years, there were 69 individual weather events each costing 1 billion dollars or more in damages. Weather disasters cost 535.6 billion dollars in the 2010s. The abnormal weather experienced in the last 5 years points to a larger issue looming on the horizon. Temperature projections by 2050 are expected to increase by an average of 2-4 degrees fahrenheit in North Dakota is going to come in the form of weather extremes from wet to dry.
“The wheat market suffered horribly because of a weather event where the quality of the crop was poor. After harvesting and paying my expenses I lost a lot of money, despite getting a huge yield last year. While the grain quality was lower, my crop insurance was geared towards yield loss and harvest calculated price, not the real price you receive, so it was ineffective in my case because they would not allow for a lot of the quality factors and I received very low price and they use the calculated harvest price. Some farmers including myself didn’t even harvest part, or all of their crop this year.”
-Donnie Nelson, Keene, ND
Climate projections indicate that as we continue to warm, the fluctuations of drought and wet cycles on the northern plains will speed up. As temperatures rise, North Dakotans can expect larger and more damaging rain storms in the east, and dryer conditions with less reliable rain out west. Food might grow faster due to higher temperatures but will become less nutrient dense with less time to mature. Erratic weather may keep crops from being planted on time causing our land to be used less efficiently. Dry conditions in the western part of the state will continue to cause wildfire numbers to increase during the next decade.
You can read a full projection here
“I don’t think there is a valid argument against climate change. The weather has been increasingly erratic and extreme in my lifetime alone. Last year we were looking at harvesting a bumper crop even though the prices were low, we figured we’d be okay. We were about to harvest, and we had record rainfall. If we don’t get rain in the next week, this year our crop won’t look good at all. It’s one extreme to another. They can argue about what’s caused it, it’s a short period in the history of the world, but science isn’t lying, and science tells us that the planet is getting hotter. There is no denying it, It’s just a fact.”
-Donnie Nelson
Farmers on the Frontlines
As we better understand our land, farmers are looking more and more like a vital ally in controlling climate change. It’s estimated that our soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock, much of which oxidized upon exposure to air to become CO2. With different practices farmers not only have the potential to trap millions of tons of CO2 in the soil but boost their yields and productivity while doing so. The top priorities of these practices would be controlling erosion and avoiding deforestation.
A new type of cattle land management called Holistic Planned Grazing (HPG) can be used as a land restoration project that mimics herding and grazing that wild animal practice. Early studies show that HPG doesn’t require more land, and if done correctly can support higher animal density. Building up our grasslands and mimicking natural environments like this can also go a long way towards preventing soil erosion and flooding by having native grasses and plant roots hold the soils in place and absorb excess moisture. Cover crops can absorb moisture to drain a field faster than a bare field, and the root systems of a plant can create a surface that farm machinery can access without getting stuck.
“We’re putting some cover crop over the soil to keep it healthy, but we also have to look at prices. It’s another overhead cost when you spend 30-40 dollars an acre planting the cover crops that you’re just going to let freeze in the winter. It has benefits, but we need to make programs to incentivize farmers to do it. I was also lucky to have some old barley seed lying around and that made a really nice and cheap cover crop. Otherwise, I may not have planted cover crops.”
-Travis Anderson
Weather
Farmers and Ranchers have the tools to help save the world. But they are going to need outside help if they are going to be able to use them.
In our next article, we’ll talk about the effect on wheat farmers and the Government response to the weather crisis.