Blog · Agriculture

The 2026 drought: why the state average hides your field

· 3 min read

More than half of North Dakota was in drought in early August, yet the statewide corn and soybean yield forecasts came out almost the same as last year's. Both are true. The difference is where you stand: a state average smooths over fields that did fine and fields that had one of their worst years in decades.

What was reported

DTN's yield tour, published on 12 August, found that more than 56% of North Dakota was in at least moderate drought on 4 August, against 18% a year earlier. Even so, its model put corn at 151.4 bushels an acre against 151.9 last year, and soybeans at 34.0 against 34.7. DTN's own analyst said he was "surprised by the forecast".

The people in the fields described it differently. A Coleharbor farmer told DTN it had been "the worst growing season in the 35 years I have been farming". An NDSU Extension agent expected yields to be "very patchy this fall". On 20 August, Valley News Live spoke to Jesse Arth near Milnor, who has farmed for 30 years: "This is probably the worst drought impact that I've seen in 30 years."

Insurance is seeing it too. In June, NDSU's Agricultural Risk Policy Center projected about $8.4 billion in drought indemnities across six major crops nationally, and described the January to May drought as comparable to 2013, 2021 and 2022, years that produced large insurance losses.

Why the average and the field disagree

A statewide number is an average over millions of acres. Drought is not spread evenly across them. It depends on where the rain fell, on the soil and how much water it holds, on when a field was planted and on what was growing when the heat arrived. Two fields a few miles apart can have very different years.

That makes the state average useful for markets and budgets, and much less useful for a decision on one farm: whether to sell ahead, how to plan next year's rotation, how to talk to a lender or an insurance adjuster. For those, the question is not "how is North Dakota doing?" but "how is this field doing, compared with its own normal?"

The general background is in microclimate: why the nearest weather station is not your field and soil moisture sensors explained.

What Prism Labs is doing

Prism Microclimate is Prism's own product for North Dakota. It covers every one of the state's 961,439 field boundaries, in all 53 counties, with field-level weather, soil moisture, frost, spray and field-work windows, and growing degree days. It is open to use now: pick your field and see how its season compares with its own history rather than with the state.

It follows one rule that matters in a year like this: we only show a prediction if it beats the simple guess on days it never saw. We wrote about that in a forecast we built, and do not show you.

Nothing here is agronomic, financial or insurance advice; talk to your agronomist, lender or agent about your own fields. Farmers dealing with the stress of a hard season can find support through NDSU Extension.

Sources

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