Heavy winds whipped across Mark True’s farm in the Texas panhandle on March 14 and 19, blowing dust through his winter wheat fields at between 60 and 80 miles per hour.
Gusts of this caliber don’t do wheat any favors, True said. His plants are now a blue-green color rather than a deep green, evidence of the wind's ability to sap soils of the moisture wheat needs to stay healthy. After limited precipitation this winter, True’s fields were already dry.
“If we’re going to have a chance to make much of a dryland wheat crop at all, we’re going to need some quantifiable moisture within the next 10 days,” he said. Dryland farming refers to not using irrigation to grow crops.
Source: U.S. Drought MonitorDrought’s presence is currently being felt in more than 44% of the continental U.S. At least 20% of the country is expected to be in drought at any given time, according to USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey. Central and western Texas, Arizona, southern California and Nevada are seeing the most extreme levels, a D4 rating as classified by the U.S. Drought Monitor.La Niña conditions are beginning to fade, as cool water flows in the central and eastern equatorial pacific shift. But the U.S. is likely to see a “La Niña hangover” over the next few weeks, said Rippey, who pointed to recent snowfall in the Northwest, severe storms in the Midwest and Southeast, and dry, windy weather across the Southwest and southern Great Plains as evidence of the climate pattern’s lingering influence.
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Dust storms have worsened an already dry start to the year for Texas farmers. Some 85% of the state is seeing some drought, with the most severe conditions in its central and western parts, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Some 71% of the state’s pasture was rated poor to very poor.
Oklahoma saw wildfires across its mostly dry landscape in mid-March, burning through at least 170,000 acres and more than 200 residences. The state’s farmers were subjected to “whiplash” after seeing a record wet November evolve into a “bone dry” winter, Rippey said. More than 75% of Oklahoma is in drought.
“It’s been pretty rough,” Rippey said of recent winds in the southern Plains. “We’ve seen a lot of loss of topsoil moisture, a lot of loss of topsoil in general. It’s just blown away.”
Farmers in the western corn belt and upper Midwest, too, are seeing limited soil moisture after “almost a snowless winter,” putting them in a tough spot ahead of the planting season, Rippey said. While dry conditions could help producers speed through spring planting, lack of soil moisture in the early stages of the growing season may hamper crop development.
One of the few regions that’s “really on the wet side” now stretches from northeastern Arkansas through Kentucky and then to parts of southern Virginia, he added. Much of this area saw flooding in February, Rippey said. 
Below-average precipitation is expected across much of the lower Great Plains and West through June, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Drought is likely to persist in much of the Southwest and northern Plains, which are already dry, and expand to parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the Center.
But above-average rainfall is expected to ease conditions in the Great Lakes region, likely removing drought in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and southern Wisconsin, according to the Center.
Mark Muntzinger, who farms in Huntington County, Indiana, said he’s seen only 10 inches of snow this winter, half of what he’d likely get in a good year. He’s received a little over an inch and a half of rain from this week’s storms, though farmers to his south and west saw more.
Still, Muntzinger’s wheat fields so far “look really good,” he said. He’s optimistic that April and May will bring more rain that will lay a foundation for the corn and soybeans he plans to plant, though he worries late summer could challenge those crops with hot, dry conditions.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Muntzinger said. “I fully expect that we could have a dry August again. Could be a flash drought, who knows? But I’m optimistic that our stuff’s gonna come through.”
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