Thanks to a strong circumpolar ‘vortex’ of frigid Arctic air, most areas east of the Rockies, especially the northern Great Plains and much of southern Canada, suffered through one of the coldest winter seasons since the end of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ in the 1850s.
One of our Harris-Mann farmer clients, Chris Hong of Grand Forks, North Dakota, had an all-time record 96 days below zero last winter. The icy region just across the Canada/U.S. border in Altone, Manitoba, observed 102 subzero days during a five-month-long winter season from early November to early April.
The spring of 2014 was likewise very cool and extremely wet east of the Missouri River. Many of our farmers couldn’t plant their soybeans north of U.S. Highway 20 in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Manitoba in southern Canada until late June or early to mid July, if then. At least 2 million acres were left fallow in the northern U.S. and south-central Canada.
While the western half of the North American continent has sweltered in the near-record heat accompanied by severe drought conditions and widespread wildfires, the eastern crop regions of the U.S. and Canada have experienced one of the coolest summers in 198 years, since the infamous ‘Year Without A Summer’ in 1816, when frosts and freezes occurred in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada during every summer month from June through September. In June of 1816, nearly a ‘foot’ of snow fell at Quebec City in northeastern Canada.
During the same summer of 1816, hard freezes in Ireland and parts of northern Europe, resulting from the massive eruption in 1815 of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora on Sumba Island, led to the ‘Great Potato Famine’ and a huge Irish immigration to America.
The Tambora eruption was the largest in modern times. It sent some 36 cubic miles of particulate into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. It was about 50 times more powerful than the better-known eruption of Krakatoa some 68 years later in 1883 that produced the loudest sound in history.
While the U.S.D.A. and other crop analysts have currently predicted ‘BUMPER U.S. CROPS’ due to an unusually cool summer in 2014, I’m very concerned that a hard freeze this September could possibly, like 1974 and other years, “wipe-out” between 15% and 30% of the corn and soybeans north of Interstate 80, particularly north of Interstate 90, into Manitoba and Ontario. Remember, we still have the chilly remnants near Canada’s Hudson Bay of last winter’s ‘Circumpolar Vortex.’ This is a REAL THREAT!
