During Memorial Day weekend, my wife and I spent a half day with my son Peter’s family in Columbia County. I can’t drive anywhere without looking at other people’s crops. After crossing the Hudson River, I was hoping to see distinctly formed green rows of nicely emerged corn seedlings compared to the occasional lonely corn planter press-wheel marks in Otsego County, which boast essentially no such emergence.
We did see some corn fields in Columbia County, but the emerged seedling inhabitants were very yellow; yet they still beat the non-appearing corn plants I left behind in Otsego County.
The average altitude of tilled fields in Otsego County is about 1,300 feet, while the corn fields we saw near Peter benefited from an average 500-foot altitude, as well as some temperature-buffering assistance from the Hudson River.
Climatologists generally agree that air temperature drops about 5.4º F for every 1,000 feet of increased altitude. This means that over a typical 123-day growing season between killing frosts – from, for example, May 15 to Sept. 15 – we could expect to see the following growing degree day (GDD) advantage for Columbia County compared to Otsego County: 800 ft. altitude difference x 5.4º / 1,000 ft. x 123 days = 531 GDD.
That difference has a lot to do with determining how long a growing season corn variety one can safely plant. GDDs for a given day are the average temperature minus the base of 50º. So a day with an average temperature of 75º would accrue 25 GDD. Add all those terms for every day between the last killer frost of spring and the first killer frost of autumn (or late summer) and there you have the total number of GDDs.
There are four major inputs that a crop needs to perform satisfactorily: first is the GDDs; second is inches of precipitation; third is the soil’s fertility; and fourth is the solar radiation measured in langleys. One langley (Ly) represents the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1º C. It’s a measure of the energy received from solar radiation on a surface. For most of May, Northeast crop growers have done quite well on precipitation and quite poorly on GDDs and Langleys. The only thing that they really control is soil fertility.
Switching gears quite a bit, let’s flash back 36 months to the so-called “elephant in the room” that few people talk about in terms of moisture extremes. That avoided subject is the huge loss of soil organic matter which could have served as an enormous reservoir. In the last 175 years, most of America’s bread basket heartland has lost approximately three-quarters of its topsoil. I calculated that the typical topsoil reduction from 16 inches to four inches, in that timeframe, has reduced water-storing effect for the states of Illinois and Iowa by an amount equivalent to the water volumes of our own Seneca and Cayuga lakes. The inability to store that amount of moisture increases the severity of drought. When the moisture pendulum swings the other way, flood damage increases in similar fashion.
In the Mississippi Basin, the all too prevalent culture of corn and soybean crops – absent off-season cover cropping – slowly but surely degrades soil health. As soil degrades, reducing organic matter (OM), almost all the liberated carbon escapes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). The mineral fraction of such soil lacking fibrous roots easily erodes and heads downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of this mineral fraction drops out from the Mississippi in its Gulf-bound meandering. Some soil arrives in the Gulf, carrying with it soluble commercial fertilizer nutrients, predisposing to Dead Zone formation.
Here’s how: excess fertilizer nitrogen (N) and phosphorus cause explosive phytoplankton growth. These minute plants are crowded to death, to then be consumed by bacteria, which gobble up any available oxygen, converting that part of the Gulf into a Dead Zone.
Dead Zones destroy ecosystems, particularly those containing shrimp. CO2 released into the atmosphere is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, which is the key factor triggering climate change. Climatologists increasingly attribute more prevalent drought conditions to climate change. Drought upstream in the Mississippi Basin was responsible in 2022 for record low water levels. Add to low water levels megatonnages of eroded soil particles in the lower Mississippi – not just the Gulf itself – and we see elevated riverbeds. This happening mandated transport barge draft reduction, lessening the distance between a vessel’s water line and its bottom and thus much smaller payloads.
Back upstream on the cropland shedding all this soil, we see that lowered OM reduces water-holding capacity. On an acre, each 1% loss of soil OM kicks loose 11,600 lbs. of carbon in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere, which in turn reduces water-holding capacity over 20,000 gallons. Clearly a lose-lose scenario.
Fast forward to May 1, 2023, when we learned that due to Mississippi closures, alternative routing methods – not just restricted water commerce – were necessitated by too much water. This actually caused grain shippers and fertilizer companies to choose such detours, parallel to the river, to move their products to end destinations. Some fertilizer shipments had to be off-loaded from barges to trucks and rail cars. Most of the flooding was caused by protracted moisture release, due to unusually higher snowfall upstream the previous winter.
According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the 670 miles of river between Minneapolis and St. Louis, the river falls about 420 feet. Moreover, this system of locks and dams was created to ease barge traffic on the river. This system was never intended to provide flood control, but to function as a “stairway of water.”
