Food crisis: Big statements in small articles

Italy is losing about 1/3 of its rice and corn crops to the heat.

We planted corn late, and now this heat wave, with high nighttime temperatures, is hitting the Western Corn Belt very hard at an inopportune time. AccuWeather is predicting a greater weather hit to corn than the USDA is.

Dryland corn in my area is just about toast. Irrigated doesn’t look good, pivots can’t keep up and flood won’t go through. Next 10 days of 100° plus and no rain. Worst year I’ve ever seen for moisture and heat. Started feeding my cattle this week, never done that in July before.

David, commenter on AgWeb’s AccuWeather article

If this is true about Germany harvesting corn for silage (i.e., not for corn), that’s a problem.

In Germany this week some farmers will start to harvest their one meter high maize for silage due to drought.
Guess we will see more of this weird scenario in August because there will be dying a lot of corn in the next 14d

— BooBoo (@BooBoo_grains) July 18, 2022

This 7:08 video might give a sense of how normal economic processes aren’t quite making sense. I think that’s because of the conflict between fundamentals and technical trading. For instance, it’s strange to see such high prices for farming inputs without seeing an equivalent increase in prices for outputs. The long-term implications here are uncertain, but they might include an increase in farm bankruptcies or people getting out of the field: If you can’t sell your goods at a profit, you won’t stay in business long.

We kinda needed a good harvest. It looks like we’re not getting a good harvest.

My usual caveat applies: There’s a lot I don’t know. If you think I’m missing mitigating factors, please talk about it in the comments.

An additional caveat: Note that a lot of the most doom-and-gloom articles at AgWeb are written by Tyne Morgan. That could mean he’s the one paying attention, or it could mean that he’s a clickbait artist. I lean toward the former, because there’s verifiable data in his articles. Other articles are less doom-and-gloom, like this one — but even that one embeds a video that backs up everything Morgan says. Having said that, I notice that his articles sometimes repeat predictions from weeks before without saying whether or not those predictions came true. Caveat lector, and don’t trust anyone, even me.