CovCath, Twitter, the Trump Presidency and a Nation Unhinged

Saturday afternoon and evening, I got sucked into the apparently fake controversy in which a kid in a MAGA hat appears to be standing in the path of a Native American protester from the Indigenous Peoples march, while his classmates surround them laughing and jeering.  I watched the video, and my initial reaction was, "man, these MAGA folks are assholes."  Then I saw this video from another angle.

My reaction to the second video perspective was a little different.  It hit a little closer to home.  First off, seeing the guy in the Covington Catholic  sweatshirt made me realize these kids were from the local area, and also Catholic.  Secondly, I saw a kid in the background wearing a Notre Dame cap.  That is my alma mater.  Finally, assuming these kids were ultra-conservative Trump supporters spouting racist crap about foreigners (build that Wall), I felt like I was looking at myself in high school.

I tried to write a post late Saturday night entitled, "In Partial Defense of the Worst Kid In America."  The gist of it was going to be that, I, like that kid, was once a super-conservative supporter of the GOP who held some pretty racist beliefs, so there is the real possibility that the kid will grow up to hold totally different views as an adult.  That pretty well describes my arc from high school kid who listened to WLW around the clock and believed the United States was being taken over by the Japanese, to an adult who finds conservative politics to be generally racist arguments that Democrats and minorities are moochers, and that social welfare programs should be slashed so that tax cuts can be given to the wealthy.  I gave up on it because it was late, I was tired and half-drunk, and I wasn't sure how in-depth I wanted to be about a few of the things I'm most ashamed of from my youth.

Come Sunday, when additional video came out, and it now appears that the supposed showdown was staged by the handful of Native American protesters, I ended up feeling bad that I was quick to assume the kids were being assholes, and that the furor raised by the Twitter mob could end up benefiting Trump's bid for re-election.  It is a pretty good example of how easily we can be swayed to believe the worst in our fellow citizens who happen to be in the opposite political camp, and how we can dramatically overreact. Even on Saturday afternoon and evening, when I assumed the kids were being assholes, I felt bad for the school administrators who were caught up in this political firestorm.  They were suddenly being overwhelmed with terrible publicity and national media attention because a group of kids were involved in a public incident, and the school was being overwhelmed with vitriol.  The administrators had to try to get out in front of the news even though they didn't really have any idea what had happened.  After the additional footage came out, the case for feeling bad for the administrators and students is overwhelming. 

I am absolutely no fan of President Trump, and I hope he suffers a landslide defeat in two years.  I equate MAGA hats with racism.  When I saw stories that the additional video showed the kids to be innocent and the Native American protester sparked the incident, I didn't want to believe it.  And yet, at the height of the Twitter freakout, when I thought the kids were the assholes in the situation, I was feeling badly for the school administrators and could look at the kid in the center of the incident and empathize with him.  If I was feeling that then, you can imagine how Trump supporters will see all of this.  It is a massive own-goal for everyone who wants to see Trump defeated. 

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Trump's inauguration.  We have two more years of this pressure-cooker political environment which will be played out in a brutal election campaign.  The events of this weekend will most likely not be the most divisive we'll see.  It is going to be miserable, and I'm afraid the wounds to our civil society are going to be even deeper than I believed before.  Everyone, myself included, needs to take a deep breath and try to back down the rhetoric. 

Chart of the Day-Rural Suicide Edition

Washington Monthly:

Included are suicide and undetermined deaths suspected of being suicides. Teenage rate is deaths under age 20 divided by population age 15-19; adult rate is for age 20+.

Emerging analyses show rapidly rising suicide, firearms, and addiction-related “deaths of despair” afflict whites the most in rural and suburban areas where white populations are most concentrated. There are many more suicides among the seven million white rural 35-64 year-old men than among all 40 million American teenagers of all races and both sexes everywhere. Rural areas also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership and firearms mortality (correlated with men’s suicide) and lack the level of mental health services that have evolved in cities.

 There has been a spate of articles pointing out that farmers have a suicide rate about twice as high as the rate amongst veterans.  The scary part of that news is that we are just coming off of a generational price boom that I probably won't see a return to for the rest of my (assumed actuarial) lifetime.  Those of us in agriculture are facing much darker days going forward, at least in a financial sense.  Meanwhile, rural areas continue their steady decline.  Considering these factors, I fear the trend in suicide deaths will continue to worsen.  I don't anticipate that either the public or private sector will work to change any of these trends.  What I can say is that faithful readers of this blog do not have to worry about me, I'll be with you until the bitter end.  I enjoy hating life way too much to ever consider cutting it short.  Plus, there is this to consider:

At Least the U.S. Doesn't Have the Most Dangerous Crumbling Infrastructure

BBC:

The US embassy in Baghdad has warned the risk of the Mosul Dam collapsing is "serious and unprecedented" and has urged people to be ready to evacuate.

Maintenance work was disrupted after the dam was briefly seized by militants from so-called Islamic State in 2014.
If the dam burst, floodwaters could kill 1.47 million Iraqis living along the River Tigris, the embassy said.
Iraq's prime minister has said precautions are being taken, but that such a scenario is "highly unlikely".
The dam, Iraq's largest has suffered from structural flaws since its completion in 1984, with the water constantly eating away at the soluble gypsum base on which it is built.
To counter the erosion, engineers need to drill holes in the gypsum and fill them with a cement grout mixture six days a week.
IS only controlled the dam for 11 days, but many of the people working at the dam did not return after it was recaptured and regular maintenance did not resume.
 The statement issued by the US embassy on Sunday it had "no specific information that indicates when a breach might occur" in the Mosul Dam.
"But out of an abundance of caution, we would like to underscore that prompt evacuation offers the most effective tool to save event of a breach," it added. "Proper preparation could save many lives."
Some models estimate that Mosul, which has been controlled by IS since June 2014, could be inundated by as much as 21m (70ft) of water within one to four hours of a catastrophic breach.
The embassy also published a factsheet that said approximately 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis living along the River Tigris in areas at highest risk probably would not survive unless the 482km (300-mile) long flood zone was evacuated.

That would be very, very bad.

Farm Bill Funnels Money to Overproducing Peanut Farmers

Reuters:

A mountain of peanuts is piling up in the U.S. south, threatening to hand American taxpayers a near $2-billion bailout bill over the next three years, and leaving the government with a big chunk of the crop on its books.Peanut growers in states including Georgia and Alabama boosted sowing acreage by a fifth this spring and now are wrapping up harvesting their 3.1-million-ton crop, the second-largest ever, even as prices plumb seven-year lows...
One way or another, U.S. farmers look set to keep producing more peanuts than Americans can consume, leaving taxpayers on the hook.
First, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying farmers most of the difference between the "reference price" of $535 per ton (26.75 cents per lb) and market prices, now below $400 per ton. A Nov. 18 report to Congress estimates such payments this year for peanuts exceed those for corn and soybeans by more than $100 per acre.

Secondly, government loan guarantees mean once prices fall below levels used to value their crops as collateral, farmers have an incentive to default on the loans and hand over the peanuts to the USDA rather than sell them to make the payments....
Through forfeitures, the USDA amassed 145,000 tons of peanuts from last year's crop, its largest stockpile in at least nine years, according to data compiled by Reuters.That stockpile is enough to satisfy the average annual consumption of over 20 million Americans - more than the population of Florida - and puts the administration in a bind.Storing the peanuts in shellers' and growers' warehouses comes at a cost. Selling them could depress the market further and in turn would add to the price subsidy bill.
Payments to peanut farmers could total between $960 million and $1.9 billion through fiscal 2018, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and USDA projections cited in the Congressional Research Service report.
The higher costs come as the 2014 Farm Bill set high peanut reference prices relative to historic averages and cut support for production of cotton, an alternative crop, encouraging growers to dedicate more acres to peanuts, the report and experts said.
The government spends far more on big cash crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans, with support for corn alone expected to cost $3.6 billion this year, according to CBO estimates. Yet relative to crops size and value, peanut crops are costlier, with payments worth more than a third of the crop's value.

I anticipate we are going to see a massive increase in government subsidies to farmers in all of the commodity programs.  Most corn and soybean farmers signed up for the program that guaranteed them payments in the next two years, but if prices continue to fall, I expect disaster payments or other program modifications to be made to ensure that farmers receive larger payments.  We had a massive commodity bubble, and the popping of that bubble will be extremely painful for rural areas which only had that bubble to keep them from being pummeled through the recession which mangled the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy.  Farmers vote, and politicians know this.  There will be a multitude of articles similar to this in the next few years, although many will focus on other commodity crops.  We had our seven good years, you can expect we'll have seven or more bad ones.

The Boom is Over in the Bakken

OilPrice:

The performance of Blood & Oil, a soap opera based on the North Dakota oil boom, is not going well. The show saw its episodes trimmed by ABC amid tepid viewer interest. But the real life Bakken is also suffering from a lack of interest, a development that doesn’t bode well for the oil-producing region.
The Bakken had been a key part of the U.S. shale boom over the past half-decade. But production peaked at 1.22 million barrels per day in December 2014. Since then production has bounced around, with month-to-month fluctuations, but is slightly down from that high point reached almost a year ago.
The EIA expects the Bakken’s production to drop by 23,000 barrels in November, a decline second only to the Eagle Ford in terms of size....
But falling production is contributing to another problem for the region. Several East Coast refiners are losing interest in Bakken crude, instead preferring to import oil from abroad to use in their refineries. According to Reuters, it is now cheaper for East Coast refiners to import oil from South America, Africa, or the Middle East, than it is to buy oil from North Dakota. The transit costs of moving crude by rail from North Dakota across the country tips the balance in favor of foreign oil.
The U.S. had managed to significantly cut its dependence on imported oil over the past decade, but the share of imports has stopped declining as foreign oil is cheap again.

If that isn't bad enough, there's also this:

In addition, Occidental Petroleum, the fourth-largest U.S. oil producer, reported a third-quarter loss of $2.61 billion, after reporting a profit of $1.21 billion in the 3rd quarter of last year.  Simultaneous with their earnings statement, they announced they'd be shutting down and pulling out of their operations in the North Dakota oil patch, to concentrate their capital outlays on their core Texas shale holdings.  Meanwhile, Marathon Oil, with a large presence in the Eagle Ford, became the first major shale producer to cut their dividend, slashing it from 21 cents to a token 5 cents per share, after they reported 3rd quarter profits of $948 million, compared with $672 million in the same period a year ago, largely from the profitable results of their Speedway retail gas station chain...
Others reporting this week included Hess Corporation, who reported a third-quarter loss of $279 million, compared to earnings of nearly $1 billion a year earlier; Anadarko Petroleum, who reported a third-quarter net loss of $2.24 billion, compared to a profit of $1.09 billion a year earlier; Murphy Oil, who reported a third quarter loss of $1,595 million on revenue of $714.9 million in the period; Whiting Petroleum, the largest oil producer operating in North Dakota, who reported a net loss of $1.87 billion, compared with a net income of $158 million last year; Pennsylvania based Range Resources, who lost $301 million in the quarter vs profits of $146 million in the same period a year ago; Cabot Oil & Gas, who reported a third-quarter loss of $2.2 million, after reporting net income of $85 million in the same period a year earlier, and Pittsburgh based EQT Corp, who reported third quarter net income of $40.8 million, mostly from hedging operations, compared to third quarter 2014 earnings of $98.6 million. Excluding the profits from derivatives trading, EQT reported an adjusted net loss of $50.2 million for the quarter...
There were two companies that didn't report earnings this week.  Denver based American Eagle Energy and Tulsa based Samson Resources, both working shale plays in the Bakken of North Dakota, both filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, both announcing plans to sell off their North Dakota assets in an attempt to pay off some of their debts.  Samson Resources apparently hopes to reorganize and emerge as a viable operator; American Eagle "could not be reached" for comment.  Between June and September, 10 oil and gas companies working in North Dakota's Bakken oil patch have filed for bankruptcy; a total of 19 have filed in the last year.  As of Tuesday, North Dakota sweet crude was selling for about $36 a barrel, more than $7 a barrel below the US benchmark price.  With few pipelines in place, most Bakken crude must be shipped by rail, adding to its costs...

I just can't imagine what things are like out there after all the crazy development of the last few years.  Is there a bunch of half-built projects and empty apartments?  I know there was gobs of money to be made there the last few years, but personally, I'd have probably been happy to miss the boom and the bust.  I seriously doubt that all of the damage to roadways has been or ever will be repaired.  I can only imagine that environmental issues that were looked at as a small cost of the boom will look much worse during the bust.  Hopefully, things will work out for the folks of western North Dakota, but I wouldn't expect the boom to return.

El Nino Probably Won't End California Drought

Wired:

Today, the National Weather Service released its monthly update on the weather phenomenon, and the meteorologists are saying this year’s is one of the strongest El Niños on record.
But that forecast comes laden with caveats. For one, it matters where and when that precipitation falls. If it falls too far south, it won’t fill crucial reservoirs. Neither would it help much with the Pacific Northwest’s wildfires. And California hasn’t even entered its proper fire season, so if the rains come too late the Golden State could face (even more) epic conflagrations. Finally, no matter how much water the El Niño brings, it’s unlikely it will be enough to sate the Golden State’s four-year deficit.
Typically, the Pacific Ocean is warmest in the equatorial waters around southeast Asia. In El Niño years, the warm patch moves east, towards South America. “You get a huge redistribution of heat in the Pacific,” says Bill Patzert, a NASA climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. This flip causes all sorts of weird weather: hurricanes, droughts, flooding, and massive storms. “The equatorial stretch of the Pacific stretches a one third of the way across the Earth, and the ocean covers thirty percent of the planet,” says Patzert. “So when that system kicks up, serious stuff goes down.”
For the month of August, the National Weather Service measured temps that were at least 2 degrees above normal in the equatorial waters off South America. That makes this year’s El Niño the third strongest on record, in terms of heat redistribution. And while effects are already being felt around the globe—India’s crippling monsoon, for instance—El Niño means one thing to most Americans: rain....
But even if this El Niño is particularly wet, it’s still not likely to alleviate California’s four-year drought. The state’s wettest El Niño, in 1983, dropped nine times the annual average rainfall. The state would need at least that much to bring its reservoirs back to normal.
Beyond California, the implications are a mixed bag. “Generally, the canonical El Niño gives the southern tier of the US a good soaking, and the northern tier has a mild winter,” says Patzert. Past El Niños have drenched and dusted the Rockies. Those mountains feed the Colorado River, the southwest’s major watershed. But El Niños tend to leave northern states drier. This is bad news for the Pacific Northwest, which is suffering its own water shortages (not to mention wildfires).

But, there is a lot of uncertainty out there.  But it is interesting (to me, at least) that the Old Farmer's
Almanac is going with the prediction of a third straight cold winter in spite of the El Nino.  I'll bet on a mild winter.

Organized Religion in Decline

Pew Research Center:

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men. (Explore the data with our interactive database tool.)
To be sure, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world, and a large majority of Americans – roughly seven-in-ten – continue to identify with some branch of the Christian faith.¹ But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus, albeit from a very low base.

So the non-religious and the non-Christians outnumber Evangelical Protestants?  Catholics and Mainline Protestants continue to bleed membership.  Well, based on bills pending throughout Republican America, I can assume this is because Christians are under attack by Godless liberals and teh ghays.  Or it could be because of Republican America and all their bills pending.  Liberal blogs always make jokes during Presidential campaigns about how any Republican gaffes are actually "good news for Republicans,"  but these numbers have to be considered bad news for Republicans, except amongst the innumerate.  Let's consider the groups Republicans traditionally do well with: rural folks, whites, the rich, the middle class, religious people, married people and the elderly.  As a percentage of the population, rural folks, whites, the rich, the middle class, religious people and married people are all shrinking, and while the elderly are increasing as percentage of the population, their support for Republicans and their likelihood of dying are directly proportional.  However, the one major factor benefiting Republicans is that the groups listed above are also the most likely to vote.  If the folks in the growing demographics voted at the same rate as the Republican-leaning population, Republicans would be on the Endangered Species list (but would probably still be politicking to abolish it).  The one thing going for Republicans amongst population subsets with increasing numbers is that their support amongst these groups can only increase.

50 Years of Failure

That's how long Cleveland professional sports teams have been losing:

This Saturday will mark the 50th anniversary of Cleveland’s last pro sports championship when the Browns beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts 27-0 to win the NFL title, the last for the franchise and the city. Since then, the Browns, Indians and Cavaliers have gone a combined 141 seasons without winning it all.
That’s five decades. That’s 18,262 days. That’s a long time.
“It’s hard to believe,” Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown said. “Because when you look back at 50 years, something’s wrong, because somebody should’ve figured out something. ... We’ve got money and we’ve got a new building and we’ve got green grass and we can draft players, and we can’t do any better than that?”
Cleveland’s title drought is the longest for any North American city with three pro franchises. San Diego has gone 51 years since the Chargers won an AFL title, but the California city no longer has an NBA team and it’s a little easier to handle misery when it’s sunny and 70 most of the year...
It hasn’t all been bad. There have been a few magical seasons, they just didn’t end magically but with heartbreak. The Browns made it to three AFC title games from 1987 to 1990, but lost each time to Denver and quarterback John Elway. Two of those defeats have been given lasting nicknames: “The Drive” and “The Fumble.”
The Indians, who haven’t won a world championship since 1948, ended a 41-year drought by getting to the World Series in 1995 only to lose to Atlanta. Cleveland returned two years later but lost Game 7 in extra innings to Florida.
With All-Stars Mark Price and Brad Daugherty, the Cavaliers had some title-worthy teams in the 1980s that were stopped by Michael Jordan. They made it to the NBA Finals for the first time in 2007 but were swept by San Antonio...
 But on Dec. 27, 1964, when LBJ was in the White House and the Beatles had invaded America, the Browns ruled.
Facing a high-scoring Baltimore squad favored by double digits and loaded with future Hall of Famers like Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry, the Browns won their first title since 1955. Wide receiver Gary Collins caught three touchdown passes in the second half from Frank Ryan, Lou Groza kicked two field goals and Cleveland’s defense pitched an unlikely shutout in front of 79,544 fans.
When he reflects on a game most Cleveland fans know only through black-and-white footage, Brown, who rushed for 114 yards, remembers one play vividly.
“My greatest memory of the game is Galen Fiss breaking through the line and tackling Lenny Moore for about a 7-yard loss,” the 78-year-old Brown said. “Galen was a real fine linebacker, but he wasn’t a great linebacker. But that day he played fantastic. ... After that I think, boy, what a great team effort. This is what team sports are all about.”
The Colts, coached by Don Shula, came in averaging more than 30 points per game. They were expected to bulldoze the Browns, who went 10-3-1 in the regular season under Blanton Collier and had nearly cost themselves a chance at the championship with a late-season loss at St. Louis.
However, they recovered by beating the New York Giants 52-20 to get to their first title game since 1957.

Even worse, it's not like the economy has been kind to Cleveland over this stretch.

From Drought to Deluge

Scientific American:

The San Francisco Bay Area is getting flooded with relentless rain and strong winds, just like it did a week ago, and fears of rising water are now becoming very serious. Major news stations, weather channels, Web outlets and social media are all suddenly talking about the “atmospheric river” that is bringing deluge after deluge to California, as well as the coast of Washington. What is this thing? How rare is it? And how big of a threat could it be? Here are some answers. And see our graphics, below, taken from a brilliant and prescient feature article written by Michael Dettinger and Lynn Ingram in Scientific American in January 2013.
Not interested? In 1861 an atmospheric river that brought storms for 43 days turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, 800,000 cattle drowned and the state went bankrupt. A similar disaster today would be much more devastating, because the region is much more populated and it is the single largest food producer in the U.S.
So maybe 1861 was an oddity. Not really. Geologic core samples show that extreme floods like the one in 1861 have happened in California about every 200 years, since the year 200 A.D. So the next disaster could be coming around the bend. The West Coast has actually been slowly constructing large, specialized, meteorological observatories that can sense atmospheric rivers as they develop, so forecasters can give early warnings.
An atmospheric river is a conveyor belt of vapor that extends thousands of miles from out at sea, carrying as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers. It strikes as a series of storms that arrive for days or weeks on end. Each storm can dump inches of rain or feet of snow. Meteorologists sometimes call small occurrences “pineapple expresses,” because they tend to flow in a straight line from around Hawaii toward the U.S. West Coast. The graphic below explains the details.

God help the Sacramento River delta if the levees were to fail. Real-time weather data here.

Columbus Tunnel Project Sees Unexpected Challenges

Dispatch:

Water and a giant hunk of bedrock 200 feet beneath Columbus has bogged down the city’s giant boring machine, leading to a two-year delay and a $29.5 million cost overrun.
The machine, nicknamed “Marsha,” is boring a 4.5-mile, 23-foot-wide tunnel that was originally to be completed this month. The tunnel is supposed to catch sewer overflows that would otherwise spill into the Scioto River during storms. The project was originally estimated to cost $342 million....
The $26 million custom machine, like something out of science fiction, was built to drill through mostly dry bedrock. But city engineers’ estimate of water levels didn’t account for millions of gallons of water that travel underground, below the Scioto River.
Instead of grinding through dry rock, Marsha was choking on a water/rock/mud mixture called slurry, which is kind of like wet concrete.
The 500-foot-long drilling machine is a cross between a submarine and a huge mechanical worm with a 95-ton cutting wheel on the front. The machine was built in Germany to digest dry rock by sending it back through a crushing screw shaft in its belly, depositing the crushed rock on conveyers that take it to the surface.
The Kenny Construction Co., based in Illinois, and the Japanese-based Obayashi group designed Marsha based on specifications provided by the city....
Marsha was to be able to drill through and remove about 68 feet of dry rock a day, or about 40 feet a day if there was water. The steel cutters on the machine have to be replaced about every 500 feet.
But the unexpected amount of water in the ground forced it to remain closed. The pipes weren’t big enough to handle the slurry because large chunks of rock would make it through the grinder.
For much of the past two years, Marsha has drilled about 25 feet per day.
At one point when the cutters needed to be replaced, the city had to hire expert divers for $1 million. The divers could work only for minutes at a time in the high-pressure underground water to replace the cutting wheels.
Davies said engineers then spent nearly a year reconfiguring Marsha with new, larger pipes and ripping out the conveyer system to add another large screw that would break down the rock even more.
Dax Blake, an engineer and the city’s sewers and drains administrator, said the city had drilled about 200 holes to test the ground before the project began.
“You never really know what’s that far underground, so all we could do was take those samples and calculate out what was down there,” he said.

 Wow, 200 test holes is a bunch.  I bet some engineer is feeling pretty bad about this project.

NOAA Closes Gulf of Maine Cod Fishery

From The Salt:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is shutting down cod fishing, from Provincetown, Mass., up to the Canadian border, in an effort to reverse plummeting numbers of the iconic fish in the Gulf of Maine.
Starting Thursday, no fishermen — commercial or recreational — may trawl or use certain large nets that might catch cod for the next six months. Local cod fishermen, who now face an uncertain future, say the government hasn't done enough to maintain cod populations, and they challenge NOAA's cod counts.
"This is uncalled for," says Joseph Orlando, a fishermen who trawls for cod off the coast of Gloucester, Mass., just north of Boston. Orlando and a friend had had been looking forward to fishing heavily for cod for the next two months, when holiday demand boosts prices. Now, that's off the table.
"There's more codfish out there. There's always been," he says. " I mean, their science is just absurd."
The science he's referring to is data from NOAA that finds haddock numbers are up, but cod are down. Michael Ruccio, an analyst with NOAA, says cod are at 3 to 4 percent of levels necessary for the population to be sustained.
"For cod to make a meaningful recovery, it's important to begin to protect their spawning activities, as well as where they aggregate and are found in large concentrations," Ruccio says.
The new federal rules expand areas where cod fishing was already banned. And accidental catches of cod are limited to 200 pounds per boat. But the Gulf of Maine is vast, and cod populations vary widely. That helps explain why fishermen like Orlando an NOAA scientists are coming up with two very different views of cod populations, says James Wilson, a professor of marine science and economics at the University of Maine.
"I live in Downeast Maine — there are no codfish in Downeast Maine," Wilson says. "There are a lot of codfish around Gloucester."
He adds, "When the feds report that, on average, there are no codfish, or very few, they're correct. When the fishermen in Gloucester report they see a lot of codfish, they're correct. The problem is trying to manage the system as if it was a single system when in fact, it is a system that has many different parts."...
The ban on cod fishing is for the current season and will be effective until May. But biologists, fishermen and regulators have been monitoring cod stocks for 40 years, and frequently changing rules. This most recent ban is the most drastic ever for cod.

The cod fishery has been decimated in recent decades.  It is a canary in the coalmine for other fisheries.

A Few Voters Have Spoken

Very, very few:

Today in the Morning Line:

• Just 36.4 percent of eligible voters turned out in 2014

• Turnout increased in some places, but decreased in most, including populous states like California, New York and New Jersey

Lowest turnout since WW2: Final numbers are still being tallied, but at this point it looks pretty clear that turnout in these midterms was the lowest overall in 70 years. Turnout of the voting-eligible population was just 36.4 percent, according to the projection from the United States Elections Project, run by Dr. Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. That’s down from the 41 percent that turned out in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1942 for lower numbers when turnout in that midterm was just 33.9 percent. They had a pretty good excuse back then — many adult-age Americans were preoccupied with fighting in a world war.
Turnout increased in 14 states: Turnout actually increased in 14 states, plus D.C., from 2010-2014. In 10 of the 14, there were competitive to potentially competitive Senate races. In nine of the 14, there were governors’ races. Here’s where turnout increased, ranked by biggest increase:
1. Louisiana: +12.9% (38.9%-43.9%)
2. Nebraska: +10.1% (37.5%-41.3%)
3. Arkansas: +9.9% (37.5%-41.2%)
4. Wisconsin: +9.4% (52.0%-56.9%)
5. Maine: +7.4% (55.2%-59.3%)
6. New Hampshire: +6.8% (45.7%-48.8%)
7. Alaska: +6.6% (51.9%-55.3%)
8. Washington, D.C.: +4.8% (28.9%-30.3%)
9. Colorado: +4.7% (50.6%-53.0%)
10. Kentucky: +4.2% (42.4%-44.2%)
11. North Carolina: +3.8% (39.2%-40.7%)
12. Florida: +3.4% (41.7%-43.1%)
13. Kansas: +2.6% (41.7%-42.8%)
14. Iowa: +1.4% (49.9%-50.6%)
15. Oregon: +0.2% (52.6%-52.7%)
It was down, though — and by a lot in many places — in 36 others. Here are the top 10 biggest decreases:
1. Missouri: -27.4% (44.5%-32.3%)
2. Washington state: -27.3% (53.1%-38.6%)
3. Delaware: -27% (47.5%- 34.5%)
4. California: -25.5% (44%-32.8%)
5. Indiana: -24.5% (37.1%-28.0%)
6. Oklahoma: -23.2 (38.8%-29.8%)
7. Nevada: -23% (41.3%-31.8%)
8. Alabama: -22.1% (43%-33.5%)
9. Utah: -20.7% (36.3%-28.8%)
10. Mississippi: -19.7% (37%-29.7%)
Significantly factoring into the overall decrease because of its population was California, which despite a governor’s race was off by a quarter of its 2010 participation. Also factoring in — Ohio (down almost 20 percent), as well as New York and New Jersey, which were both down about 17 percent. Even Georgia, despite its hotly contested Senate race, was down 14 percent. And for Democrats looking for what went wrong in blue states like Maryland and Massachusetts, turnout was down in those states by 10 percent as compared to 2010.

It's surprising to see Wisconsin so high up there.  You'd think that a governor who didn't come close to meeting the employment goals he promised, while neighboring states improved more, might have a tough time getting re-elected (especially one who is so unlikable [asshole]).  Apparently not.  Looking at these overall numbers, it is hard to see Congress as representing all Americans.  It definitely does over-represent rural Americans; of that I'm sure.

Demographics and the Decline of the Big Ten

The New York Times highlights how the Big Ten's  poor performance in recent decades has hurt member schools' recruiting efforts in their own states:

Depending on whom you ask, Jerome Baker, a senior at Benedictine High School here, is either the highest- or the second-highest-rated football prospect in Ohio from the class of 2015. He is a four-star linebacker, appraised from 36th to 72nd nationally....

Almost every pundit predicted Baker, 17, would become a Buckeye. But this summer, when he made his oral commitment, he said, referring to his team’s mascot, “This Bengal, next fall, will be a future Gator,” and slipped on a Florida visor.

Baker is both a symptom and a cause of an undeniable fact of the sport’s landscape: The Big Ten is not what it used to be.

Through the first five weeks of the season, Big Ten teams are 6-11 against the other major conferences and 4-9 against out-of-conference teams in ESPN’s Football Power Index top 50. Indiana lost to Bowling Green. Minnesota was crushed by Texas Christian. Michigan was roundly defeated by Utah at home in a game that the Wolverines paid the Utes $1 million to play.

Big Ten teams won only one title during the 16-year Bowl Championship Series era (Ohio State 2002) and have captured only one other national title since 1971 (Michigan 1997). Penn State won two titles and Nebraska won three titles in the past four decades, before joining the conference. The Big Ten’s relative decline could be further exposed this season because the College Football Playoff will feature only four teams, meaning at least one major conference will be left out. If the season ended this week, and the playoff were determined by The Associated Press poll, the Big Ten would be the only major conference without a representative.

While all that is depressing, the real story, as I've highlighted before, is demographics:

Probably the Big Ten’s biggest obstacle is that its members’ states do not produce top football players the way they used to. It is no coincidence that the Big Ten had postwar glory years, when the Midwest thrived on the back of the auto industry. The Rust Belt and the decline of Big Ten football are not unrelated.

Today, Texas and Florida each produce more than twice as many Division I football players as Ohio does, per Scout. com. In the last three classes, according to ESPN, the Big Ten’s 11 states produced six five-star recruits. Florida alone produced 11.

Josh Helmholdt, who covers Midwest recruiting for Rivals.com, said: “I always hear that a four-star in the Midwest is not as good as a four-star in Florida. That’s wrong. They’re every bit as good. The Midwest just doesn’t have enough of them.”

An instructive comparison is Michigan and Georgia. In 1960, Michigan had twice Georgia’s population; in 1990, it was nearly one and a half times as big; today, their populations are roughly equivalent. Over the past eight years, according to Scout.com, Georgia has averaged 169.3 recruits per year to Michigan’s 64.1. In the last three N.F.L. drafts, 51 players from Georgia were selected, while only 16 from Michigan were. (In the first rounds of those drafts, the SEC had 33 players selected; the Big Ten nine.)
“Can the Big Ten compete?” Mike Farrell, Rivals’ national recruiting director, wrote recently. “My simple answer is this: only if it recruits in the Southeast.”

The problem is, just like when it comes to keeping retirees in the Rust Belt, the weather really works against us.  Add to that the fact that the SEC is so dominant, and it is going to be really hard for the Big Ten to compete for athletes in the Midwest, let alone in the southeast.  Urban Meyer has done ok at it, but the end of the season last year again highlighted how overrated and underchallenged the Buckeyes were all season.  What good does it do to dominate the Big Ten when the Big Ten sucks?  The difficulty for the Big Ten reflects the difficulty Rust Belt cities have stemming brain drain.  Demographics make things very tough.

Things May Get Ugly

Wonkblog looks at the dark side of our probable bumper crop:

But American corn and soybean farmers aren't suffering because they're struggling to grow corn and soybeans; rather, they're seeing the repercussions inherent in producing too much of them. "If you look around the country, it's pretty hard to find a bad corn crop right now," Gregory Ibendahl, associate professor of agricultural economics, said in an interview. This year's corn crop, as it turns out, is going to be the largest in history, according to USDA estimates. The same is likely to be true of 2014's soybean output (paywall)....Broadly speaking, record harvests are rarely bad news. "As a farmer, you can't do anything about prices," Ibendahl said. "All you can do is try to produce as much as you can in any given year." Large stockpiles of corn today should give way to commensurately large cash piles of profit down the road, even if it means storing much of it until prices recover.
But low prices can be devastating, especially if they sustain themselves over long periods of time. "If you're a farmer facing continual low prices, you might have to take some land out of production." Ibendahl said. "Somewhere along the line you might even reach a point where you have to go out of production."
The U.S. farming sector is not quite there yet—the point at which those farms that are most affected can no longer afford to stay in business—but that doesn't mean there isn't potential for such a scenario. "I think it [low prices] will continue for a lot longer than most people think it will," Ibendahl said. 

 Yeah, I may take some of the stories in the Bible at less than face value (Genesis and Revelations, for instance), but the story of Joseph and the seven years of plenty followed by seven years of difficluty rings true.  We recently had our seven years of bounteous harvests.

Infrastructure Fails While Budgets Stagnate

LA Times:

U.S. spending for transportation and other infrastructure accounts for 2.4% of its economy versus about 12% for China, says economist David Dollar, a former China director for the World Bank. Europe's infrastructure spending is about 5%.
Dollar, now with the Brookings Institution, says visiting Chinese officials and business leaders frequently remark how surprised they are at America's declining infrastructure, sometimes asking whether they can help finance improvements.
American politicians, from President Obama down to small-town mayors, decry the deplorable condition of infrastructure, but many are reluctant to raise taxes or boost tolls and user fees.
Between the federal government and local entities, government spending for highways runs less than $90 billion a year, which is barely enough to maintain the status quo, let alone improve roadway conditions and performance.
That's partly why the share of congested highways in U.S. cities has risen from 25% in the early 1980s to more than 40% today, according to the Transportation Department. Roads with "acceptable ride quality" fell from 87% in 1995 to 82% in 2010.
It's especially tough for states such as Rhode Island that have been lagging economically and depend heavily on Uncle Sam for transportation funds. The federal highway program is funded by an 18.4-cents-per-gallon gas tax, but that hasn't budged since 1993.
Now, the fund is on the verge of insolvency. Congress came through last week with a last-minute replenishment of money, but it'll only last until May.
The upshot is that states and localities make do with what they can.
A quarter of the country's 147,870 bridges are deficient or obsolete, according to a July report by the White House on infrastructure investment. Rhode Island's are in the worst shape in the nation, with 57% of its bridges falling into those categories.

We can't afford to maintain the infrastructure we have, and we've under-invested for decades.  We built way too much infrastructure revolving around automobiles, and way too much infrastructure in sprawling suburbs.  Meanwhile, we abandoned many areas of our major cities, and let their roads, transit and utility lines rot.  We are starting our long, slow retreat to a lower standard of living.  It isn't going to be pretty.

Too Much Corn

WSJ:

The U.S. Agriculture Department projected last week that production will exceed 14 billion bushels, topping last year's historic harvest.
Many analysts think this week's closely watched Pro Farmer crop tour will offer further evidence of a remarkably healthy crop, and that demand isn't likely to rise enough to offset the sharp increase in supply....
Expectations of a glut have driven corn prices down by 13% this year, to near four-year lows, after a 40% decrease last year. September futures, the front-month contract, rose 1% to $3.6575 a bushel on Friday on the Chicago Board of Trade. Contracts for December delivery, after the harvest, settled 0.7% higher at $3.7625 a bushel....
Farm animals are the biggest consumers of U.S. corn, gobbling up about 34% of the national supply, according to the USDA. The plunge in corn prices has been a boon for producers of beef, pork and poultry, with some growers adding more corn to their feed mixes in lieu of ingredients that may be costlier like hay and alfalfa.
Still, several factors likely will limit the increases. The disease porcine epidemic diarrhea virus has helped trim the nation's hog herd by 5%, or 3 million animals, from a year ago, according to USDA data from June. And the U.S. chicken flock is roughly the same size as a year ago.
Meanwhile, years of drought in the southern Great Plains has shrunk the nation's cattle herd to the lowest levels in six decades. The number of cattle in feedlots, which fatten animals for slaughter, fell 2% in July from the same time last year, and the calf crop is the smallest since 1949. Overall, the USDA projects the amount of corn fed to animals will increase just 1% in the year beginning Sept. 1....
Another third of U.S. corn typically goes to make ethanol, where consumption is constrained by the so-called blend wall: The vast majority of U.S. vehicles can't handle gasoline that is more than 10% ethanol, and the U.S. gasoline supply is already nearly 10% ethanol. That means U.S. ethanol demand can only increase if Americans pump up their overall use of gas, which the U.S. Department of Energy expects to tick up slightly this year and then fall in 2015.
That leaves exports.

This was bound to happen.  High corn prices and drought squeezed livestock growers, decreasing feed demand.  As long as manufacturers won't approve higher ethanol blends there is a cap on demand for ethanol.  We're likely going to see a couple of years of low corn prices, which will impact the entire corn belt economy.  If you are a landlord, expect rent prices to go down.  If you are a banker, expect land prices to go down.  Hopefully, not too many farm loans are secured by additional land that farmers own.

Recent Urban Flooding, Climate Change and Civil Engineering

In light of urban flooding in metro Detroit, Long Island and Baltimore, meteorologist Dr. Marshall Sheppard looks at the link between changing climate and civil engineering design:

 Figure 1. Percent changes in the amount of precipitation falling in very heavy events (the heaviest 1%) from 1958 to 2012 for each region. There is a clear national trend toward a greater amount of precipitation being concentrated in very heavy events, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Image credit: NCA Overview, updated from Karl et al. 2009.

As our climate warms, scientists have warned for decades of an accelerated water cycle that will lead to more "extreme" hydroclimate (flood, drought) extremes . The recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report, which is Congressionally mandated since the late 80s/early 90s, published these facts/graphs showing the top 1% rain events have increased in intensity everywhere in the continental U.S over the past 50 years. (http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/heavy-downpours-increasing)....But, intensity is only part of the story. For the first time in history, a majority of the world lives in cities. I discuss the growth of urbanization and its implications on weather and climate in a recent Earthzine article. Urbanization requires more roads, parking lots, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces that alter the urban water cycle and optimize urban flooding potential.
Additionally, civil engineers and hydrologists use recurrence intervals/frequency (best represented as IDF curves) to design engineered systems for storm water management and drainage. A host of peer-reviewed literature affirms that many cities' storm water engineering is designed for last centuries rain storms or under an assumption of stationarity (i.e. 1950s rainstorms are just like 2014 rainstorms). Consider the abstract of this peer-reviewed paper:
"The hydrologic design standards for urban drainage systems are commonly based on the frequency of occurrence of heavy rainfall events. Observations of recent climate history indicate that the frequency of occurrence of heavy rainfall events is increasing. This increasing trend will likely continue in the future due to global warming. In this study, extending from previous analysis results for Chicago, the rainfall intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) relationships were determined to represent the climate conditions of the first and second halves of the last century. Using these IDF relationships, the impact of the observed increase in heavy rainfall events on the design and performance of urban drainage systems were quantified. This quantification demonstrated the need for updating rainfall IDF relationships to reflect changing climate conditions. In the design of new and retrofitting or replacement of old urban drainage systems, up to date IDF relationships need to be used to maintain design standards."
By the way, I didn't even get into the recent literature suggesting that Arctic amplification may be causing "wavier" jet stream patterns that could lead to more extreme events. I personally am letting that play out a bit more in the literature because I am not a big fan of "1-study" conclusions on either side of the issue. However, a recent National Research Council study has captured current literature on that issue.
The bottom line for me is that cities must strategically consider hydrometoeorology and climate in its current and future planning, storm water management design, and transportation systems.

 This is a major issue for everybody, including farmers, but it is most significant for civil engineers.  They will have to adapt their design standards to take into account more frequent occurrences of
large rainfall events.  To put things in perspective, Elwynn Taylor claims that his data showed what were considered to be 100-year storms (1% probability of occurrence in any year) is more like a 17-year storm today.  Back in my days designing storm sewer systems and detention structures, most communities required a full-flow pipe design carry the 10-year storm, with a check of hydraulic grade lines for the 25-year storm to confirm that flooding wouldn't occur.  This would indicate that some localized flooding would be expected to take place in 50-year and 100-year storms.  Likewise, many of our detention basin designs were based on controlling the outlet flow from a development during a 100-years storm in the post-development condition down to the level of a 5-year storm in the pre-development condition of the site.  If these storms are happening more frequently, and even bigger storms, which are outside of the design parameters, are also taking place more frequently, we are going to see damaging floods.

The challenge is that with the climate already changing, it is hard to figure out just how much more rain to expect, and just how frequently.  Even if we adjust the rainfall intensities to take into account the changes shown in the map above, there is a very real likelihood that intensities will continue to increase.  At the same time, these design standards impact property developers more than anyone else.  Any increases in design rainfall intensities lead to larger storm sewers and more land set aside for storm water detention, and thus higher costs for developers, and fewer and more expensive lots for development.  The developers are generally pretty influential in state and local politics, and can be counted on to lobby against such changes.  They have little interest in what happens in 15 years, they just want to get their lots sold and move on to another project.  This will guarantee that changes in design requirements will be difficult to enact.

Finally, much of this week's flooding occurred in older suburbs which were built in the days before storm water detention became standard practice.  These communities have seen significant demographic change as residents have aged and newer, more prosperous communities have sprung up further in the periphery of the metropolitan areas.  Since the communities were developed without detention facilities, it would be very expensive to construct these structures in the built environment.  With the demographic changes, it is more difficult to fund the required projects than it would have been in the past.  The more frequent flooding makes these neighborhoods less desirable to live in, which lowers property values more and makes needed infrastructure improvements even less affordable.  It is an ugly feedback loop that looks to make these areas into urban eyesores.  Whatever civil engineers decide to do with their design standards, climate change will seriously impact our communities in ways many people won't expect.  You might want to buy a life raft.

The Maumee River Watershed and Lake Erie Algae

Wired has a nice piece explaining the phosphorus issues in Lake Erie:

Maumee is the largest watershed in the Great Lakes system. It runs right through the Breadbasket of the Midwest, an intensively farmed area. Satellite views show thousands upon thousands of little boxes of green; the highly productive farms and fields of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.
The Maumee watershed is such productive farmland because it was once a swamp; the Great Black Swamp. Drainage tiles allowed removal of water from the surface of the soil, and made wonderfully rich swampland available for farming. Drainage tiles also collect up runoff and deliver it very efficiently to streams and rivers....
The problem is not as simple as “bad farmers”; farming best practices actually use fertilizer highly efficiently. Only about 2 percent of applied fertilizer is lost. The problem is volume; that many farms, golf courses, and suburban lawn owners applying fertilizer adds up, even if only a small amount washes off each allotment.
Chemistry plays a role as well; changes in the type of fertilizers sold make them more soluble (“bio-available“), and easier for plants (including algae) to take up and use. So while the total tonnage of phosphorous entering the lake is much smaller, the problem of too much phosphorous persists.

The Maumee watershed has to be one of the most intensively tiled and ditched watersheds in the country. Most of those ditches have little or no riparian area to provide a buffer from field runoff.  Then, there's this:

High amounts of rainfall create bursts of runoff and a sudden pulse of fertilizer. And extreme precipitation events (heaviest 1 percent of all rain events) are increasing; precipitation in downpours has increased by 37 percent in the Midwest since 1958. 

The Maumee watershed has some of the heaviest, most poorly drained soils in the United States, and thus will have greater amounts of runoff when high amounts of rainfall occur. Increased precipitation will result in even greater increases in runoff, as the soil can't hold any more water than it did when precipitation events were less intense.

Finally, the depth of the Western Basin plays a big part in the algae problem:

Lake Erie is different from the other Great Lakes because it’s so shallow. The western end of the lake (where Toledo is) has an average depth of only 24 feet. The water warms quickly, and it’s a great place to live if you’re a blue-green algae (cyanobacteria). Say, toxin-producing Microcystis. Microcystis has the ability to control its buoyancy; it can sink or rise to the top of the water at will to chase the sunlight.

These are some of the exact same issues that caused massive problems at Grand Lake St. Mary's, except the problems there were magnified by the massive population of livestock, and the immense amounts of manure applied to the land in the watershed.  Farmers have to become very proactive on this issue if they want to avoid the heavy hand of regulation.  In other words, we have a short time to get our shit in gear, or the government will be forced to bitch slap us.

Expect More Pressure On Farmers After Toledo Water Debacle

From a story earlier in the spring:

The gooey muck she’s talking about is blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, which, when it’s overfed by fertilizers in the water, can grow into blooms that are dangerous to drink or even touch. In recent years cyanobacteria has poisoned multiple pets who drank from the lake, and last summer it shut down a water treatment system in a township near Toledo...
Stepien explains that the Maumee River, a large river that runs through the middle of Toledo and into the bay, carries fertilizer runoff from up to 150 miles away. The Maumee Bay is a particularly warm, shallow part of the lake, and as runoff gathers, the algae becomes a well-fed monster.
But this isn’t some mysterious green goblin. Stepien says the problem can be traced primarily to phosphorus, an ingredient in commercial fertilizers that’s also found in manure, and sewer overflows from municipal water systems....
Most of the area that drains into the Maumee River isn’t golf courses or suburban lawns: it’s farms. There are miles and miles of them — mainly corn, wheat and soybeans — from Toledo all the way up the Maumee River and its tributaries, which extend into Indiana and Michigan.
“We could argue back and forth about is it urban, is it yards, is it agriculture, is it municipal water systems,” says Tadd Nicholson with the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association. “I prefer to say it’s all of those things.”
Corn has been booming recently due to ethanol production, so farmers are planting to the very edges of fields, and at least some of them are laying the fertilizer down thick. But Nicholson says the corn industry is producing more corn per acre while also using less fertilizer than it did a few decades ago. In other words, corn can’t be solely to blame for the resurgence of algal blooms. And, like Glorioso, he says education and voluntary programs to reduce runoff are as beneficial for the industry as they are for the lake.
“If we can show farmers how to minimize phosphorus runoff, it’s not a hard sell, it’s something that we are very motivated to do,” he says.
It’s worth noting that over-applying fertilizer isn’t against any laws in Ohio, and agriculture in particular has long been exempted from aspects of the Clean Water Act; the industry has also pushed back against water quality regulations for runoff. There’s a bill pending in the Ohio legislature that would require agricultural users of fertilizer to apply for a permit. It has the support of the Ohio Farm Bureau, but not the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association. And even that law is not really a set of rules but a required educational program. In Illinois, a 2010 law restricting the use of phosphorus in fertilizer exempts farms and golf courses.

The Maumee River and Wabash/Grand Lake St. Mary's watersheds are two of the most degraded and heavily farmed watersheds in Ohio.  It is no surprise that they have the worst issues with cyanobacteria.  They both are heavily channelized with little to no filter strips between the water channels (ditches) and crop areas and nearly no vegetation.  Farmers hate regulation, but if we don't get our shit together, we're going to get a lot of it, and deservedly so.  Hopefully, the 'do not drink' order is an overly cautious move to protect the public because the cyanobacteria issue is a poorly understood safety risk.  Even if it is, it is a wake-up call that farmers must heed.

Low Commodity Prices Cause Worry In Corn Belt

Wall Street Journal:

Tumbling corn prices are sowing fears that many U.S. farmers will suffer their first losses in years and the agricultural economy could face its first sustained slump in a decade.
Corn prices have plunged nearly 30% in the past three months to their lowest point since 2010 as near-perfect weather in the Midwest fuels expectations of a second consecutive bumper harvest. Prices of other crops have fallen sharply as well, with soybeans trading near 2½-year lows and wheat near four-year lows.
But the slide in corn prices is expected to cut sharply into overall incomes in the U.S. Farm Belt because corn is the country's largest crop, grown on 350,000 farms and yielding about $60 billion in farmers' revenue last year.
Now 57% off its record high in 2012, corn is trading well below the $4-a-bushel threshold generally required for farmers to earn profits. That means many growers this year likely will fail to cover their costs for the first time since 2006, according to agricultural economists.
Signs of strain already are evident in the Midwest. Farmland values in some regions have begun to dip after a yearslong boom, and demand for farm equipment has slipped. DeereDE -1.05% & Co., the world's largest seller of farm equipment, reported a 9.5% decline in its second-quarter profit in May and said U.S. sales of farm and landscaping equipment would decline between 5% and 10% this year. Sales of tractors, seeds and other farm supplies are expected to suffer further as farmers keep dialing back spending.
"A lot of money has evaporated," said Matt Bennett, who farms 3,000 acres in Windsor, Ill. "It's going to be hard not just on farmers, but also the guys who build sheds" and "sell pickup trucks."
Mr. Bennett, 39 years old, said he expects to make a profit this year because he already sold about half his expected crop for about $5 a bushel. But "margins will definitely get squeezed" and 2015 could be much tougher, he said.

The article goes on to say the bankers and economists think this time is different, and there won't be a big bust because farmers aren't heavily in debt.  I guess we'll find out if they are right.