The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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June 4, 2009

Rain not critical for crops — yet

Area short about four inches of precip this year

By Tim Krohn

WASECA — In the past 94 years of record keeping, this May was the 19th driest.

“For the growing season, which starts May 1, we’re about 2 inches below normal,” said Jeff Vetsch, assistant soil scientist at the Southern Research and Outreach Center in Waseca.

Since Jan. 1, the area is 4 inches below normal precipitation.

The story is the same across much of Minnesota, according to Thursday’s report from the National Drought Mitigation Center. The southern half of Minnesota is rated abnormally dry or worse. And the portion of the state in moderate or severe drought is expanding, particularly around the Twin Cities area and part of southeastern Minnesota.

Forty-six percent of Minnesota is now rated abnormally dry or worse, up from 32 percent last week, while 11 percent is in drought and 2 percent is in severe drought.

In spite of the dry conditions, Vetsch said farm crops are not yet suffering.

“While you obviously want moisture, a dry spring is not necessarily bad for crops. The crops are small and don’t use much moisture and it’s been cool, which has really helped. They aren’t under the kind of heat stress they get in July and August,” Vetsch said.

It’s a different story for gardens, lawns and young shrubs and trees. “The lawns are starting to look like they do in July.”

There is still a fair amount of moisture in the soil, albeit not near the topsoil. Vetsch said a soil test done Monday in Waseca, going down 5 feet, showed the soil held 85 percent of its moisture capacity. “But the top 6 inches to a foot is getting dry.”

On the bright side, June is normally the wettest month. “So even if we come close to that, we’ll be fine,” Vetsch said.

The best chance for a good rain is Sunday.

The last time it was this dry locally was in 2002, when there was even a bit less rain during the spring than this year.

But we’re still a long way from the benchmark of droughts — the Dust Bowl year of 1933. That year, Waseca had just 0.14 inches of rain in May.

Across the Upper Midwest, a large part of northwestern Wisconsin remains in moderate to severe drought, and abnormally dry conditions have expanded in eastern South Dakota, western Iowa and eastern Nebraska.



On the Net: U.S. Drought Monitor: http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html

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