Hoosier Ag Today Chief Meteorologist Ryan Martin is already looking into his crystal ball to see what the weather forecast might look like for spring planting. He presented on the seminar stage at last week’s Indiana Farm Equipment & Technology Expo at Westfield’s Grand Park.
To be clear, it’s not actually a crystal ball he uses. Sophisticated weather models and tracking historical trends lead him to believe it might be a wild spring.
“So, as I kind of dug into this coming planting season, I looked long and hard at basically what happened this past fall. Of interest to everyone was the exceptionally wet October that we had and, honestly, how that impacted the entire fall. When we start looking through things in that lens, a lot of folks are expecting something wild and crazy to happen next year. Yes. It will.”
Martin predicts some ups and downs come planting time.
“It’ll be probably too wet and too cold. Now, it’s probably not together, but I think this planting season gets drawn out kind of like we saw the harvest season get drawn out this past fall. So, that’s issue number one. Issue number 2- we may not be seeing any wild and crazy individual events on a large scale, but I’m seeing a lot of highly localized weather challenges, i.e., certain segments of the state get way too much rain while others don’t. So, it’s going to be more of the same that we saw this fall, I think, statewide and probably Eastern Corn Belt wide.”
You can hear Martin’s full Indiana farm forecast each and every weekday in the Hoosier Ag Today podcast at hoosieragtoday.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.