The Corn Is As High As... What??

Indiana Corn

Well, the corn in Indiana was definitely not as high as an elephant's eye in late July.  Far from it, in fact.

It looked to us to be about 2 to 3 feet high in most places and was already tasseling.  The leaves at the top of the stalks was reaching up like the leaves of agave plants.

The soybeans weren't looking much better to our eyes, but we couldn't tell much about them.

It was a different story in fields where there was irrigation; that corn was looking pretty good, tall and green and looking like corn should in July.

Irrigated Corn

There wasn't a lot of it available for purchase.  Cindy loves sweet corn but she had to hunt to find some for dinner.  The Amish farm near her sister's house usually has some for sale, but none while we were there this year.

She finally found some at a roadside produce stand; the ears had been cut in half because the birds had apparently gotten the seeds on the top of the ears.

Is this year's heat and lack of rain an aberration or will it continue?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Drought Monitor website indicates that there are already both short and long term effects in most of the areas affected most severely by the current drought.

My parents both grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, an experience nobody wants to repeat.