Reports of farmers abandoning winter wheat crops in Kansas, USA have emerged this week,
following an extended period of dry weather. A look at weather data since the start of the year
confirms this drought with rainfall around 60% of average for the year to the end of April.

When looking at the USA as a whole the area of the country denoted as experiencing very dry
conditions was around 17%, comparable to the previous three years but nowhere near that of April
1949 when 53% of the country was very dry.

With as much as 33% of the crop forecast to be abandoned, the prospects for wheat prices
elsewhere in the world must have improved.

Another interesting story which caught my eye this week was that of sea surface temperatures in
the Pacific Ocean setting a ‘new record’. As always I am extremely cautious when claims of new
records are made and the first thing I do is to check how far back such records extend.
In this case satellite data is being used back to 1981 (so a 42-year temperature record). This gives
us a decent span of time in which to compare and given an ENSO cycle (combined El Niño and La
Niña conditions) lasts an average of 5-years, we have around 7 or 8 periods to compare.

The daily temperature conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean certainly were warm this year and
would be tied into the El Niño (warm upwelling) which was developing at the time. On several days
in early April 21.1C was recorded as the average temperature, and this was the highest since
1981.

Models have been long been predicting a strong El Niño, and regardless of the record temperature
(or not), there will no doubt be impacts on the weather in Europe. Most notably a wetter summer
for Iberia and France, potentially the southern UK too.

(this article is published in this weeks Farmers Guardian)