For farmers, watching and waiting is a spring planting ritual. Climate change is adding to anxiety

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As climate change drives an increase in spring rains across the Midwest, it can mean more anxiety for farmers eager to carry out the ritual of spring planting

SABINA, Ohio — It was just after dark as Ross Woodruff hopped into a truck to haul soybean seeds out to his brother, Mark, whose planter had run out. It was the first day they could plant after heavy rains two weeks earlier left much of their 9,000 acres too muddy to get equipment into the fields.

With drier conditions, Mark had been going hard since mid-afternoon, finishing the beans in one 60-acre field before moving to another.

“This year, with the way the weather’s been, it’s slowed progress,” Ross Woodruff said. “I wouldn’t say we’re behind but a few more rains and we’re going to be.”

Waiting on the weather is an old story in agriculture, but as climate change drives an increase in spring rains across the Midwest, the usual anxiety around the ritual of spring planting is expected to rise along with it. In Ohio, for example, farmers have lost about five days of field work in the month of April since 1995, according to Aaron Wilson, the state's climatologist.

When farmers have to wait for fields to dry out, already long planting days can become endurance tests that stretch into the night. Delays in planting can affect yield if they are significant enough, and the quality of crops planted in wet springs may suffer at harvest, too.

“The expectation going ahead is that this will continue to be a worsening issue,” said Dennis Todey, director of the Department of Agriculture's Midwest Climate Hub. “We need to help agriculture understand that and develop new management mechanisms to deal with that by changing how we plant, changing when we plant, changing what we