NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bryce Anderson’s talk on March 2 at the Commodity Classic couldn’t have been more timely, as he went over weather projections for the coming growing season while Nashville was under threat from a massive wave of storms and tornadoes from the West.

The worst of the weather went around the Opryland Resort and Hotel hosting the Classic, but the neighborhood was still hammered by brief, powerful high winds and driving rain later that afternoon.

Anderson, agricultural meteorologist for DTN/The Progressive Farmer, explained it’s not just speculation that the United States has been getting more precipitation in recent years; figures show rainfall trends and tendencies have been increasing overall since the 1930s.

He said it hasn’t been a steady, yearly “straight-line” climb, but there is more water falling out of the sky than there used to be.

There is evidence of more rain, in heavier precipitation events, now. He described this as getting more than 1.25 inches of rain in one rainfall, since after that point it stops soaking into the ground and becomes runoff. “A five-inch rain in one day is not that much of a benefit,” he pointed out.

Anderson said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported from 1958 to 2007, there was a 31 percent increase in annual heavy precipitation events in the Midwest, a 20 percent increase in the Southeast and a whopping 67 percent increase in the Northeast. Last year, flooding from the Missouri River near Omaha, where he lives, lasted from June 1 clear through Labor Day.

“There is still quite a bit of question of how much of that flooded bottom ground in western Iowa and northern Nebraska” is going to be suitable for planting this year, he pointed out.

All of this adds up to make fieldwork more of a logistics challenge. Bigger machines and wetter fields make it difficult to get in, Anderson said, and there’s greater cost as farmers find they may have to install tiling even on rolling ground to handle heavy rain.

It also means adjustments in fertilizer timing – early spring anhydrous ammonia may not stay in the soil for later spring planting.

A recent report from The Climate Corp. – which sells customizable weather insurance – warns the current La Nina conditions in the eastern Pacific Ocean will likely persist through the spring and are likely to cause significant planting delays for growers in Ohio and eastern Indiana.

It speculates this could mean combined losses of up to 40 million bushels of corn for both states.

La Nina could possibly be pushed aside by El Nino conditions by June or July, Anderson explained. La Nina refers to cooler-than-normal sea temperatures driving precipitation across adjacent landmasses, but this winter, he said Pacific temperatures are warming an average of 1 degree Celsius “like a giant hot-water faucet got turned up” into the ocean – possibly signaling a change to El Nino.

When this happened in 1976, he said it meant near-normal precipitation in this part of the Midwest but dry weather on the edges of the Corn Belt and in the northwestern Corn Belt. Crop production in Tennessee and Kentucky was more than 30 percent above the yield trend, Ohio was 20 percent above and Indiana, 18 percent above. Michigan was 10-20 percent below, however, and Iowa was 5 percent below.

A late-summer switch to El Nino would benefit soybeans more than corn, Anderson said, because of the timing of rain as a result.

He added the National Center for Atmospheric Research is giving such a switch a 60 percent chance of happening.

Further support that La Nina may be winding down comes from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; he said the country charts a related phenomenon in its waters known as the Southern Oscillation Index, which is La Nina’s “other half,” taking place at the same time.

Pressure in that system is winding down, too.

Could temperatures in the Pacific begin dropping again before an El Nino pattern materializes this year?

In a concession to respecting the potential of weather to change at its own will, Anderson said he can’t rule it out – but a continued track toward a change is more likely.

For Iowa, he said DTN projects a mild spring season with limited drought relief. South to the Ohio Valley will likely bring a spring rain surplus, and temperatures in the Tennessee Valley and Kentucky should be mild with adequate rainfall. There should be a little easing of the drought conditions in Texas and the Southwest.

Elsewhere, he said farmers in the southern part of Brazil “haven’t been able to buy a decent rain all year,” resulting in lowered corn and soy projections.

Argentina has seen much improvement in its precipitation through its central Crop Belt after a hot, dry early growing season for that country – just as would happen here, Anderson said this is better for its soybeans than its corn.

And in Canada, he said the outlook is for dryness across its Prairies this year. This is important because growers there plant a great deal of canola, which is a competitor of soybeans internationally.