Ag Weather Forum

El Nino And Trendline Corn Yield

Bryce Anderson
By  Bryce Anderson , Ag Meteorologist Emeritus
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A comment made its way around the ag social media platforms this week that made a few of us go "hmm". The comment went like this:

"...an El Nino summer has NEVER produced below trend line corn yields in the U.S."

Absolute comments are certainly worth checking out, and notably so in this case, just ahead of planting season. Of course, whether El Nino will actually still be around in a couple months is still up for conjecture. Nonetheless, let's dive into that posit. Does the presence of El Nino in the summer mean that U.S. corn yields are NEVER below trend line?

In checking this question out, I used the NOAA Climate Prediction Center's Oceanic Nino Index (ONI) as the parameter for defining El Nino. This index is based on whether the equatorial Pacific temperatures are at or above 0.5 degrees Celsius for a 3-month period (a ballpark definition). For the summer season, I looked at the June-July-August period. Since 1950, there are 15 years when this time period had the ONI value in El Nino territory. I ran those years by Joel Karlin, author of the DTN "Fundamentally Speaking" blog, and Joel checked the yield versus trend in those years.

Results of this checking showed that there were seven years when, even though El Nino was in effect, the final corn yield was actually BELOW trendline.

Here are the years and departure from trendline yield---

1952 -11 percent

1953 -10.5 percent

1957 -9 percent

1958 -4 percent

1963 +5 percent

1965 +8 percent

1969 +13 percent

1972 +19 percent

1982 +12 percent

1987 +8 percent

1991 -8 percent

1997 -2 percent

2002 -7 percent

2004 +12 percent

2009 +7 percent

So, again, to respond to the absolute statement that summers with El Nino NEVER have below-trend line corn yields--the answer appears to be "yes, they do."

Bryce

Twitter @BAndersonDTN

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