Articles Tagged with ''drought''

Arizona farmers are bracing for water cuts next year after the Bureau of Reclamation announced a historic shortage at Lake Mead, which collects water from the Lower Colorado River Basin.

The prolonged drought in the upper Midwest is dragging down crop yields by more than the government or traders expected, although U.S. farmers should produce 4% more corn and 5% more soybeans this year than they did in 2020, according to the Agriculture Department's first survey-based estimates of the fall harvest.

The House Agriculture Committee approved an $8.5 billion disaster bill that would cover a wide range of producers’ losses in 2020 and 2021, with somewhat more generous provisions than the recent relief programs.

Several western states are dealing with the second-largest grasshopper outbreak that the U.S. has seen in 35 years.

Livestock producers across the West and northern Plains are relying heavily on rangeland insurance policies this year, even as the Agriculture Department considers changes to the program that could limit future indemnities for some farmers and ranchers.

The Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service is offering more than $41 million in funds meant to soften the blow of drought in California, Colorado, Oregon and Arizona.

Grant Lundberg is CEO of Lundberg Family Farms in Richvale, California, which he describes as a vertically integrated consumer packaged goods company. Lundberg talked with Agri-Pulse about how consumer demand and drought are impacting organic rice in California.

The infrastructure spending deal that President Joe Biden struck with a bipartisan group of senators could go a long way toward addressing critical agriculture needs, from improving waterways to making high-speed internet universal and fixing many crumbling bridges and roads.

States in the West and the High Plains are currently facing what Brad Rippey, a USDA meteorologist in the Office of the Chief Economist, calls the “most expansive” drought the U.S. has seen since 2012 and 2013.

Farmland values in parts of the U.S. are on the rise as commodity prices and government payments spur buyers in the Corn Belt while water access fuels the market in California's drought-stricken Central Valley.