There's a Drought in Corn Country

I spent the past four days on the road driving down to a northern suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma to pick up an adding machine that I bought on eBay.  More about the adding machine ( it weighs 75 pounds) later.  Traveling south from the Twin Cities, I noticed that the green color disappeared from the farm fields, highway medians and the like about halfway to the Iowa border.

If you were not aware of it, this has been a summer of serious drought in corn country.  How bad is it?

Well, this is a corn field in Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities.


And, this is a corn field in northwest Missouri.


Here is a closer look.


This gives you a feel for what a chart like the one in this report means.


And since 40% of the nation's corn crop goes to fuel, via government mandate, all of the drought-related shortage is going to come out of the food supply.  Explanation here.  Expect higher prices!