Driving around south-central Kansas to get a look at the progress of the winter wheat crop confirms one piece of good news: freeze damage in this part of the state appears to be minimal in spite of a couple of very cold nights. Probably a solid half of the wheat is either headed out or beginning to head and most of the fields I saw had only a few, if any, telltale white heads that indicate the growing point was damaged by unseasonably late freezes on April 24 and again on May…

Continue Reading

It’s starting to look green in southern Kansas, in spite of the fact that the final remnants of the recent five-inch snow are still hanging around. They will be gone in today’s 60-degree sunshine. That recent snow and the 20-plus inch blanketing we got a few weeks ago, along with a couple of showers in between is enough to bring out the smiles on the faces of farmers in this region, where wheat fields are looking great as the crop breaks dormancy and heads toward the spring…

Continue Reading

You’ve heard of the million dollar rain. South Central Kansas may have just gotten the million dollar snowstorm. Maybe even the multi-million dollar snowstorm. The storm, which dumped anywhere from 9 to 18 inches of snow across a wide swath of the state, is welcome moisture to a region parched by more than two years of drought and made drier still by warm, windy winter weather. At least for now, that picture has changed. Highs are forecast to be in the 20s and 30s for the…

Continue Reading

Scattered rain across Kansas has brought some recharge to the reservoirs in the eastern part of the state – good news for the communities that depend on those reservoirs for drinking and industrial water. There is continued concern, however, that the prolonged drought now entering a third year could cause water supply shortages during the hot summer months. In a public meeting in Burlington on Feb. 5, Kansas Water Office policy and planning director Susan Metzger told a crowd…

Continue Reading

Whoo-hoo!! There’s rain in the forecast! Well, a 70% chance of rain. Of  course, with the drought moving into a third year I’ve come to understand that means a 70% chance that two drops will fall from the sky and maybe land somewhere I see it happen.  But it is deeply cloudy and gray outside. So there is room to hope. Much less uplifting are the predictions that I’ve heard from three different sources in the last couple of weeks. Those predictions all…

Continue Reading

It wasn’t much and it’s way too warm for the end of January, but the Wichita area finally got a shower of more than welcome rain on Saturday night and into Sunday – a total of about 0.6 inches in fact. It’s no drought breaker but it sure does help. On the positive front of the warm temperatures, we didn’t have to deal with the ice that my brother tells me is a real hassle on the family farm in northeast Missouri. The flip side of that is with temperatures in…

Continue Reading

    OK, I have a new biggest worry of the day. I’m no longer saying passing a Farm Bill is the most important business ahead. I’m not worrying about the federal deficit. I’m not even worried about Kansas running out of money because nobody is paying taxes. My new worry – and it is a biggie – is about running out of water. I’ve been traveling around the state the last couple of weeks, checking out the state of reservoirs, rivers…

Continue Reading

The calendar says it is Nov. 2 but you sure couldn’t prove it by the weather. Wichita  set a record highof 86 today before another cold front is set to move through tonight and drops us back to the 60s for weekend highs. Not that the 60s seem particularly November-ish either. What’s troubling, however; is that like the previous cold front that dropped temperatures here 50 degrees overnight – and eventually turned the torrential rains of Hurricane Sandy to a…

Continue Reading

The drought continues in the High Plains, with Nebraska hardest hit and Kansas improving somewhat. Three-fourths of Nebraska remains in exceptional drought, the worst category on the U.S. Drought Monitor. About 40% of Kansas is in that category. Kansas, Nebraksa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado are in drought from moderate to exceptional, mostly in the severe to exceptional categories. The multi-state, severe dust storm of last Thursday was a reminder of how vulnerable our…

Continue Reading

One thing I noticed this week is that when it rains, vegetation grows. That was a lesson almost forgotten in the blistering hot, incredibly rain-devoid months of drought June, July and most of August. The lawn didn’t grow, the garden flowers barely stayed alive and all the annoying unwanted growth pretty much stood still. Then it rained. Really rained, like 3 inches, rained; enough to put drought on hold for days, maybe even weeks. That was all the unidentified woody shrub that…

Continue Reading