Happy almost-Tuesday!
Grab your coffee, because the forecast folks are using words like "historic" and "no one alive has seen this," and that's not a sentence you want to hear before harvest.
We've got a wild weather pattern on deck, a hard look at what's happening to Prairie grassland, and a stat that'll make you glad you're not running the grain dryer around the clock this fall.
🌾 The Big Bin: El Niño Threat Puts Historic Harvest Delays on the Table
What Happened: A rapidly strengthening El Niño is on pace to be one of the strongest ever recorded, based on ocean temperature readings well above the benchmark years of 1997 and 2015.
Why It Happened: Sea surface temperature anomalies are forecast to blow past every modern El Niño on record, and one atmospheric scientist says the pattern is shaping up to cut typical fall field-workable days by roughly 20% across a wide swath of the continent thanks to a wetter, slower harvest window.
What It Means for the Farm Gate: The Prairies are actually flagged as one of the few pockets bucking the wetter trend, but that's cold comfort when your neighbours to the south are getting rained out.