It’s going to be a cold one. South Dakota has already seen its share of cold weather, even before winter officially begins. A weather expert advises bracing for more cold days ahead. That follows a growing season that, for many South Dakota farmers, was ideal.
Except for areas that had entirely too much rain, many of the state’s farmers were very fortunate, harvesting one of their best crops ever. From a production standpoint, Eric Snodgrass says the weather, which skewed wetter than normal, required a change in crop protection.
“This was one of those years where if you hit your crop twice with fungicide, you were rolling it. I mean, it was great. You were having a great year,” said Snodgrass, an atmospheric scientist with Nutrien Ag Solutions. “That's usually not what we're talking about. We should be talking about ‘how close is drought, how hot is it going to get? How many stretches of super-hot nights are we going to deal with?’ And 2025 brought an entirely different thing.”
Snodgrass talked about the weather at the 2025 South Dakota AgOutlook conference in Sioux Falls. He says the I-states, including Illinois, where he’s from, generally did not fare as well as eastern South Dakota this past growing season, the effects of which are farther-reaching into inland waterway shipping.
“We're very dry in Illinois in places, and as we get into winter, snow doesn't usually cure a drought. You have to wait till your spring rains come along,” he told the South Dakota Soybean Network. “So, we're quite concerned about the fact that, well, the Mississippi River, after the Missouri and the Ohio come into it, is still pretty low. I mean, it's still more than a foot-and-a-half below its low stage. We need to get that way up. We need it to be about 25 feet above low stage. So that's a lot of ground that needs to be made up.”
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