Widespread Drought Across U.S. Stoking Fears That 2012'S Devastation Will Repeat

Mar 06, 2018

By Madelyn Beck

The U.S. Drought Monitor shows most of the United States is in need of rain. The early signs of drought are raising concerns about a repeat of 2012’s drought, the worst since the Dust Bowl, that cost farmers, ranchers and governments $30 billion.

Western Illinois might be close to the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, but it’s the driest part of the state this year.

“We really haven’t really had any measurable rain since the middle of October,” says Ken Schafer, who farms winter wheat, corn and soybeans in Jerseyville, north of St. Louis. “I dug some post-holes this winter, and it's just dust.”

His farm is in an area that the U.S. Drought Monitor considers “severe.” Some of the nation’s worst areas of drought are in southwest Kansas, much of Oklahoma and a slice of Missouri. But several states are in some sort of drought, from Illinois to California, the Dakotas to Texas.

The worry also is widespread, considering the reach of this winter’s drought is even worse than in 2012, a year that brought the worst drought in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl and cost cost farmers, ranchers and governments an estimated $30 billion, according to the federal National Centers for Environmental Information.

If things don’t get better, it’ll show in producers’ pocketbooks and on the taxpayers’ dime — a difficult thing to swallow considering the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects farmers’ incomes to be at a 12-year low even if crop yields stay high.

However, it’s only February, which is one of the driest months on the calendar. And, outside of some winter wheat, the lack of moisture won’t impact many crops. There’s still time for spring rains to rehydrate the region.

“If this was July, we'd be hitting the panic button,” according to Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel. “But in the wintertime, it's always kind of a little odd because droughts develop slowly and you know there's not much going on out there.”

A few larger rainfall events could bring areas back to normal by the time planting season comes around. That’s what happened in 2013, when the 2012 drought lingered into the new year causing conditions even drier than now.

But sudden, widespread precipitation changed things around.

“We had torrential rains in April of that year,” he said. “We had some places in Illinois that had 8 to 12 to 16 inches. I mean, it was like Biblical amounts of rainfall in one month.”

Climate change is bringing these massive, wet storms to the Midwest more often, Angel says, especially in the last four or five years. Because of that, he said that even if there is a drought this year, it likely won’t stay in the Midwest for long.

The West is another story: “California, Arizona, New Mexico, that area is getting drier over time,” he says. “And that's some of the expectation of how it will move in the future; that we'll continue to get wetter and they'll continue to get drier.”

Ken Schafer's farm is in Jerseyville, Illinois, about 35 miles north of St. Louis. It's the driest area in the state. He says he'll need at least some moisture before he plants this corn field in April, plus steady moisture afterward

Dry country

In the southeast corner of Colorado, Gary Melcher says there’s been at least 10 years of winter drought out of the last 13. The region got rain throughout much of 2017, and Melcher, who lives in Holly, says they’ll depend on what’s left over.

“We were blessed last year with some moisture so that's given us the ability to hold on and wait for a little bit of this spring moisture hopefully,” he says.

But it’s not just crops. Dustin Stein has a cattle ranch in Mancos, located in southwest Colorado. He’s a relatively young farmer, in his 30s, and started out in the midst of the 2012 drought.

He says in the roughest, driest years, farmers have to make sacrifices because there’s not enough grass growing in the fields.

“In a drought year, you’re forced to sell off your asset [cows and heifers] in a way that helps you keep your other assets alive,” Stein says, adding that it doesn’t just affect ranchers that year, but down the line in terms of herd numbers and profits.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”