Ag Weather Impacts

A disturbance that started out yesterday over northern California and brought scattered showers and thunderstorms will move across eastern Oregon today and into Idaho tonight. Additional rainfall today will be mainly a quarter inch or less. Generally dry weather will return for tonight and Saturday, but then another round of showers is expected for Saturday night and Sunday with rainfall amounts of a tenth to a third of an inch. Although the moisture will help relieve the seasonally dry conditions of the past couple months, it may cause soil crusting and emergence problems next week for recently deep seeded winter wheat. Additional showers are possible Tuesday, but it looks like this will be mainly south of Prosser to Dayton. It is possible for a drier period to begin Wednesday and extend well into the following week, but we'll look closer at that on our Tuesday impacts. Temperatures were into the upper 80s and to mid 90s on Thursday, which was 10 to 12 degrees above normal, but you can expect a cooling trend this weekend and temperatures actually slightly below normal Monday and Tuesday. Of course the cool and unsettled conditions will greatly slow hay drying and nighttime humidity will rise to between 75 to 85 percent the next several nights. Crop water use will be lower as well. Plan on corn and alfalfa to use around 1 inch the next 7 days, while lawns and grapes will need around 8 tenths of an inch. Part of this will likely be supplemented by rainfall.