Worst drought in decades in the American heartlands threatens to put farmers out of business

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Uk Telegraph:

The fields on Eddie Melton's farm in the rolling terrain of western Kentucky should be covered by a thick green quilt of eight-feet high corn stalks at this time of year.

Instead, withered brown plants, barely half that height, are straggling out of the barren soil. The sorry landscape, repeated in states across the American heartlands, is testimony to the worst drought to strike the region for more than half a century "This drought has already devastated the corn crop," said Mr Melton, who farms 1,500 acres settled by his great-great-grandfather in the late 19th century. "We're just praying for some rain to save the soybeans."

The US agriculture department last week designated 1,297 counties across 29 of the 48 mainland states as "primary natural disaster areas".

The debilitating combination of low rainfall and high temperatures has produced America's largest drought zone since 1956, with more than half the country officially classed as suffering drought conditions.

And for many farmers, it is evoking stories from their fathers and grandfathers of the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

In a telling illustration of the drought's impact, a golf tournament in Indiana was halted last week after a player lost a ball down the deep fissures in the bone-dry earth of what was once a water hazard.

Corn and soybean farmers in America's mid-West are reeling. And on the Plains, ranchers are selling off their cattle early and cheaply as they struggle to feed their livestock on scorched prairie pastures after already using up next winter's stores of hay.

Consumers around the globe will encounter higher food prices as a result of the drought ravaging the world's biggest grain exporter. Economists are warning that already-volatile wheat-importing regions of Africa and the Middle East will face potentially destabilising increases in prices.