How The Drought Killing Kansas Corn Crops Could Make You Pay More For Gas And Beef

Sep 21, 2022

By David Condos

This dry, hot summer has claimed its share of victims in Marc Ramsey’s cornfields.

Fewer than seven inches of rain have fallen this year in the area he farms between Dighton and Scott City — nearly one foot below the historical average.

“This is a year unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Ramsey said. “There are lots of times this year I’ve just kind of been at a loss for words.”

Across western Kansas, vast swaths of brown, shriveled corn plants succumbed to the oppressive weather before reaching more than a couple of feet tall. Others grew ears with no kernels or no ears at all. Some of Ramsey’s stalks that stretched to six-feet-tall on July rains withered down to nothing under the late summer sun.

The harvests from these western Kansas cornfields typically fuel billion-dollar industries, such as feeding cattle. But with so little corn to go around this year, those industrial customers are paying a premium to ship grain in from other states just to keep their operations running.

Even during the region’s last big drought a decade ago, Ramsey said, his cornfields still had a decent number of bushels to harvest. This year, he estimates roughly half of the corn he planted won’t yield a single piece of grain.

“Just saying ‘zero yield’ is a painful thing to say,” Ramsey said. “It’s hard not to be disappointed.”

The ripple effects of this year’s poor corn harvest in Kansas will extend well beyond stressing farmers and their livelihoods.

As it becomes more difficult and expensive for cattle feedlots — where animals are fattened up for slaughter — and ethanol plants to get the corn they need, people across Kansas could face higher prices at the grocery store and the gas pump.

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The corn crunch

Historically, it’s been common to see corn sell in western Kansas for about $4 a bushel.

Dan O’Brien, a Kansas State University agricultural economist based in Colby, said that number has roughly doubled. Prices had already been creeping up since Russia invaded Ukraine — another major corn exporter — and now thanks to the drought-fueled shortage, the price in western Kansas is around $8 per bushel.

“The reason that we built those grain-using industries out here had to do with availability of grain, and now they’re crunched,” O’Brien said. “That sets off a whole series of responses … all of them not good.”

The lack of local corn supply is already pushing Kansas cattle and ethanol companies to bring in grain by rail from places like Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. That’ll inflate corn prices across the Midwest, as local corn-dependent industries in those states suddenly have to compete with more buyers from Kansas.

But it’ll especially hurt Kansas. O’Brien estimates it’ll cost Kansas industries an extra $1 per bushel to ship in corn from other states.

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In the short term, O’Brien expects the corn crunch to push meat and ethanol prices up. Beef prices had fallen recently as the drought forced livestock owners to sell off more of their cattle.

But even those higher prices might not be enough to keep corn-dependent companies profitable in western Kansas.

“Is that enough to offset the major increase in the cost of corn?” O’Brien said. “Whether it’s livestock feeders or ethanol plants, they all operate on the margin.”

Feedlots that can’t afford to pay a premium for getting corn from out of state may have to send some animals to slaughter early. And if the drought continues and corn prices remain high for months, it could start to reshape the future of those industries in western Kansas.

There might not be enough corn in western Kansas to keep ethanol plants going here for the long term, O’Brien said, when they could shift operations to the other parts of the Corn Belt where the grain is more readily available. Likewise, some Kansas feedlots may buy less cattle next year because of the rising cost of grain.

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Breaking the drought

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that Kansas farmers will harvest 628 million bushels of corn this year. That would be 122 million bushels less than last year.

If you multiply those 122 million missing bushels by the elevated $8-per-bushel prices, it means the state’s agricultural economy is missing out on nearly $1 billion due to the drought.

“If you just look at the typical annual Kansas corn and sorghum production,” Kansas State University agronomist Lucas Haag said, “and then figure the reductions that are going to be due to drought, we’re talking huge sums of money.”

The USDA says more than half of the state’s corn is in poor or very poor condition. That’s up from around 20% at this point last year.

It’s a similar story for sorghum, which is typically considered a more drought-tolerant alternative to corn. More than half of Kansas sorghum is in poor or very poor condition — up from just 15% last year.

While irrigation has helped some farms avoid the worst, Haag said, many fields with center pivot sprinklers will still be abandoned because farmers just couldn’t pump enough water to save them.

“There's very few areas of the state where we actually have wells that have the capacity to match up for when we're this short of precipitation,” Haag said.

Water levels in the Ogallala aquifer — the primary water source for most of western Kansas — have been declining for decades since the dawn of irrigated farmland. Estimates show that if pumping trends continue, more than two-thirds of the water under Kansas will be gone within 40 years.

And it’s unclear when farmers in western Kansas will feel some relief.

It’s the first time in a century that a La Niña weather pattern, which fueled droughts across the West and Great Plains in 2022, will show up for a third consecutive winter. And the National Drought Mitigation Center expects drought to persist across Kansas through at least the end of this year.

To make matters worse, a poor crop this season will likely leave fields with less residue — the pieces of plant matter that remain on the ground to help soil store moisture. And with so much of western Kansas already in a deep precipitation deficit, Haag said, it’ll take more than a few rains here and there to get the region back on its feet.

Marc Ramsey has heard from other western Kansas farmers who consider him lucky for having anything to harvest at all. Lots of folks who planted dryland, or nonirrigated, corn this year won’t even bother taking a combine into their fields.

“I guess they get to relax a little bit more in the next couple of weeks,” Ramsey said. “But, you know, that's the kind of relaxation none of us want.”

Last year was dry too, Ramsey said, but his soil still had enough residual water to produce more than 50 bushels of corn per acre. This year, one of the hottest, driest summers on record has rung that dirt dry — the USDA reports that 86% of the soil across Kansas doesn’t have enough moisture.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”