Persistent Drought Plagues Midwest for a Second Year

Drought and drought-related pestilence are threatening large portions of America’s desiccated heartland, now in its peak growing season but still thirsting for relief from the drought of 1988.

“Areas deficient in rainfall this year never quite recovered from last summer’s drought,” said Ken Kunkel, director of the Midwestern Climate Center at the University of Illinois.

This year’s drought is unlikely to approach either the geographic or economic scales of last year’s, which was one of the costliest natural disasters in American history, driving up food prices and driving down important economic indicators.

But the 1989 drought, building on last year’s event, will affect tens of thousands of farmers and the economies of Midwestern states from Illinois to Kansas and from Missouri to North Dakota. Wide areas of the Southwest and West are also being affected by drought this summer.

Here in northwestern Minnesota, swarming grasshoppers in numbers that have only been recorded in periods of severe drought are attacking fields of wheat, barley, sugar beets and oats. Soon they will move to the corn and soybeans.

“I’m 60 years old, have been in this business 30 years and I’ve never seen them like this before,” said University of Minnesota entomologist David Noetzel. “And the real tough part is still two weeks away for us.”

Noetzel has counted as many as 1,100 grasshoppers per square yard of ground, 140 times what is considered normal. Farmers are routinely reporting 400 to 800 grasshoppers per square yard, 50 to 100 times normal and the biggest infestations since the great Dust Bowl droughts a half-century ago.

Damage from the grasshoppers is already estimated at $20 million, Noetzel said.

In Iowa, traditionally the nation’s biggest producer of feed corn, fields are dry as the corn plants enter the critical grain producing phase of their life cycle.

“We are short in topsoil moisture over 93% of the state,” Dale M. Cochran, Iowa’s agriculture secretary, said at week’s end. And 99% of the state’s fields have virtually no subsoil moisture vital to sustain corn plants that normally reach a height of eight feet.

In North Dakota, a major producer of spring wheat and sugar beets, Gov. George Sinner declared a drought disaster last week. North Dakota State University estimates this year’s losses so far at $540 million, about half of what drought cost the state last year.

Wells providing drinking water to more than 100 small towns in Missouri, Kansas and Iowa have dried up, reported Donald A. Wilhite, director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology.

Drought in Colorado has not only made conditions ripe for wildfires but also is driving black bears from their rugged mountain homes into the populated foothills around Denver.

Dutch Elm Disease

Botanists in the suburbs of Chicago have reported the worst outbreak of deadly Dutch elm disease in 15 years as infected beetles prey on drought-weakened elm trees.

Even farmers in Nebraska who used irrigation to escape the full thrust of last summer’s drought are being affected this year because, unlike 1988, they began the 1989 growing season with fields that had virtually no stored moisture.

“Last year people in the state were saying, ‘What drought?’ ” said Wilhite. “This year they had the driest March on record for much of Nebraska. In two-thirds of the state rainfall was only 50% of normal. April was about the same. In May about half the state had only 10% of its normal rain and much of the rest of the state had only 50% of normal rainfall. Those three months were just devastating.”

Winter Crop Losses

Drought losses to the winter wheat crop in Kansas this spring are now estimated at close to $1 billion and may be larger when the harvest is completed in the next 10 days.

Congress is already at work on disaster legislation to help farmers hurt both by drought and by floods that affected farms in the East, South and Southeast. Last year farmers received close to $3 billion in government drought aid.

Insecticide Legislation

The Minnesota Legislature--aware that grasshoppers thrive in drought because it eliminates the moisture-fed diseases and fungus that control them--this year approved a controversial law requiring farmers to control locusts. If they refuse, local governments have the power to spray insecticides and to add the cost of spraying to a farmer’s annual tax bill.

The legislation was opposed by environmentalists who claimed spraying could harm wildlife and other beneficial insects, such as bees. Organic farmers, who use no chemicals on their crops, opposed it--as did farmers who have agreed to take their land out of production for 10 years in exchange for a relatively small annual payment from the federal government.

‘Harsh Words’

Clashes have erupted between farmers who want the bugs sprayed and those opposed to the spraying.

“There has been no violence, just a lot of harsh words,” said Paul Anderson, a farmer in Warren, a member of the Marshall Township board and the township clerk. “It gets to be neighbor against neighbor. Usually it takes (a conflict over) water to create this kind of problem.”

“Most farmers want to spray,” said Eldor Omdahl, 79, a retired farmer who has refused to spray. Omdahl donated 640 acres of his land in nearby Polk County to the Audubon Society for a bird and wildlife sanctuary, and spraying, he said, threatens the animals and birds. The remainder of his land is in the government reserve program and has no crops on it.

“There is a lot of tension there. We don’t know who will make the first move,” said Omdahl, standing near his garden that has been largely eaten by grasshoppers. “They wanted my brother to spray and he ordered them off his land. It’s a destructive situation. You have township officials administering the law and they are all biased farmers. . . . We didn’t know anything about the law until the grasshoppers came.

“It’s a cost issue with me,” Omdahl added. “One of the reasons I put it in the (federal reserve) is for the money. But I like to protect wildlife. That’s why I gave it to Audubon.”