Extreme weather events appear to be more common than they once were. This year has already delivered several major disasters to the country. California has been deluged by one atmospheric river after the other, and the South has been wracked by a series of tornado outbreaks. Whether this year’s weather disasters will beat last year’s near-record-setting disasters is still unknown, but an El Niño will likely play a major role in this year’s weather.
According to the National Farm Bureau Federation, 18 weather disasters, each with damages exceeding $1 billion, occurred across the United States last year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that last year’s weather disasters caused an estimated $165 billion in total economic losses, surpassing 2021 as the third-costliest disaster year on record. Total crop and rangeland losses exceeded $21.4 billion, accounting for nearly 8% of the total economic impact.
And now, NOAA said El Niño, could arrive much earlier than previously expected. While not a weather disaster, El Niño, definitely can change weather patterns. During an El Niño weather phenomenon, temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise off the coast of South America, shifting the jet stream and fundamentally impacting weather around the globe, said Monica Ganley, analyst with the Daily Dairy Reportand principal of Quarterra, an agricultural consulting firm in Buenos Aries. NOAA now gives a more than 60% likelihood that El Niño will take hold sometime before July and persist through the end of the year. But El Nino’s impacts won’t all be negative, Ganley said.
“El Niño typically brings warm, dry conditions to the northern United States as well as to the Midwest, while the southern United States typically experiences above-average rainfall,” Ganley said. “The impacts of an El Niño are incredibly nuanced, but in years when the weather has transitioned from a La Niña in winter to an El Niño in summer, U.S. corn production has benefitted. The cooler temperatures that accompany this transition have typically boosted corn yields, and in many cases resulted in record productivity.”
Combined with the increase in acres that U.S. farmers are expected to plant to corn this year, Ganley said that the pending El Niño raises the odds that this year’s corn crop will be very large. And that could help offset shortfalls expected elsewhere and ultimately reduce upward pressure on feed prices for dairy producers, she added.
“While U.S. corn production could benefit from El Niño, impacts are more varied south of the equator,” Ganley noted. “An El Niño typically brings wet weather to swaths of South America, and while this season’s corn harvest has already begun, it could result in planting delays as wet weather prohibits machinery from entering fields next spring. Excessive precipitation brought about by El Niño can also cause flooding and wash out roads, undermining milk production in South America.”
Meanwhile, in Oceania, El Niño typically causes dry weather in Australia and on New Zealand’s North Island, while above-average rainfall is more likely on New Zealand’s South Island, all of which could bring negative consequences for milk production. Australia is coming out of a three-year wet period after experiencing years of dry conditions and severe drought that along with deregulation has devastated the continent’s dairy industry. And New Zealand’s milk production for the current season has been lackluster.
