Happy Thanksgiving To All My Dear Followers Who Celebrate ^^

Happy Thanksgiving to all my dear followers who celebrate ^^

happy birthday jimin! (13 october, 1995)

A Bitter Wind at a Shaky Time, and Iowa Is Left Reeling

As the winds howled outside, gusting at over 100 miles per hour, families hid in their basements and wondered what would await them when they emerged.

Many across the Corn Belt of central Iowa were stunned by what they saw: millions of acres of corn and soybean fields left toppled, tangled and torn apart; roofs torn off grain bins; buildings leveled — another daunting setback in a farming community that has had too many of them.

The damage this time was from a derecho, a line of intense and fast-moving windstorms marauding across the prairie. But it adds more pain to a series of economic challenges compounded this year by the effects of the coronavirus.

State officials estimate that as many as 14 million acres of farmland — more than a third of the state’s total farmland — were damaged, an increase from an earlier estimate of 10 million acres. Hundreds of millions of bushels of commercial storage grain bins and tens of millions of bushels of on-farm storage grain bins were likely lost to the storm.

The hardest-hit counties, a band of 36 across Iowa, included 3.6 million acres of corn and 2.5 million acres of soybeans.

The true monetary loss probably won’t be known for weeks, but even farmers whose fields were not totally leveled will suffer losses. “It’s hard to really get your arms around the devastation at this point,” said Shannon Textor, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Corn Growers Association…

The past few years have been tough ones for many farmers in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest.

Beginning in about 2013, a number of factors, including a leveling out of the ethanol industry, caused demand growth for corn and soy to slow down even as production increased, said Chad Hart, an economist at Iowa State University who specializes in the crop market.

That led to a decline in prices, made even more difficult by ongoing trade disputes between the Trump administration and China, one of the main foreign purchasers of American crops.

“The short story is 2019 was the year from hell and we were glad when it was over,” said Jim Greif, a corn and soybean farmer in Prairieburg, about 60 miles north of Iowa City. “Now 2020, I don’t know what you’d call it, but it’s worse than last year.”