August 12, 2020

10 million acres of Iowa corn farmland devastated by storm

Mike Naig, Iowa Agriculture Secretary said the Derecho storm on July 10 had impacted about 10 million acres of Iowa corn farmland and millions of bushels of grain storage, Reuters reported.

Naig said the storm impacted, destroyed or severely damaged about tens of millions of bushels worth of commercial grain storage. This included millions of producer-owned bushels of on-farm storage bins.

This may leave farmers rushing to find new storage for their crops ahead of the upcoming fall harvest.

A spokeswoman for Archer Daniels Midland said the company's Iowa plants in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines have been taken offline and is currently being checked for damages.

Naig said it is too soon to know how much downed corn can produce viable crop for the upcoming harvest, as well as the total damage the storm had caused to the crops and Iowa's overall agricultural industry.

Agronomists said with harvests in September or October, it is too late for farmers to replant.

Iowa's main agriculture is corn, with 2.58 billion bushels of the commodity produced in total last year in the state. This accounted for 19% of all United States corn, based on data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The USDA reported 14 million corn acres were planted in Iowa this year, representing more than half of all farmland in the state.

The July 10 storm caused property damage across the United States Midwest, more than a million homes and businesses without electricity.

-      Reuters