drought

Global warming is often described as an abstract, distant issue. For any of us who grew up in Wisconsin in the 1980's, it is far from that. In 1988, as the news was breaking of the dire environmental threat of global warming, even worse than the hole in the ozone layer,the worst drought since the Dust Bowl era struck. It decimated  our lovely Wisconsin summer, the pay off for enduring frigid Arctic winters, and was the starting gun on what would become a painful, dry decade. For an area that's home to most of the planet's fresh water, where the lakes are both Great and plentiful, it was scary stuff. I remember that the fire of my environmental activism was further enflamed by those long hot summers.

Weeks of intense heat combined with extraordinarily dry conditions have brought many U.S. corn farmers to the brink of total disaster. 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, drought is affecting nearly 90 percent of all corn crops in America at this point, pushing the price of corn to record highs above $8 per bushel in late July.