Owen Price

Upper Midwest shows up on the relief side, which is more than I expected from an El Niño map. For central Illinois the honest read is not much signal either way, and Erdman says himself that strong El Niños don’t all leave the same footprint. What I care about is a recharged soil profile by April, and these maps stop at February.

“That means significant improvement, if not outright removal, of drought conditions is expected over much of the southern tier of the U.S., as well as parts of the upper Midwest and some lingering Northeast drought areas, according to an outlook from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center issued on Sept. 17. That includes New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and the Carolinas. And while longer-term, multidecadal water supply concerns linger, we do expect a much wetter snow season in the southern and central Rockies and Desert Southwest. However, drought conditions may linger or even spread in parts of the Northwest, Northern Rockies and Northern Plains.”

WOver half the US is in drought. Will El Niño quench it?weather.com

Meanwhile, the last Extension crop report of the season, from DeWitt, Macon and Piatt. Good, not great. No drama in that sentence, and in a harvest report no drama is the good news.

“Corn harvest is in full swing, with yields generally good, but not as good as last year’s.”

FIllinois Crop Update | September 25, 2026farmdoc.illinois.edu

I’m a scout leader, sort of. My boys’ troop books a campsite every spring, and the website is the easy part. If this saves my wife the name-change runaround I watched my sister go through, that’s real.

But “it’ll arrive almost instantly” is in the same speech as a site whose own page says the forms come in 2027. Out here we plant on the forecast, not the promise.

Didn't expect corn and soybeans in a Fed chair's answer about bond yields, but there they are, right next to crack spreads, which is the refiners' cut between crude and the diesel that goes in a tractor. His other two reasons long rates are up are a strong economy and hyperscalers out raising money, so my land note is competing with data centers for dollars. I can't do a thing about any of the three, and my operating line floats, so the quarter point lands on top.