Jill Richardson: Huge Food Corporations Will Make Price Hikes Worse!

Farmer George Naylor sounds a little too much like the fictional character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, when asked about his corn crop. June is usually a wet month, but not this year. One time it rained so little it just barely wet the bottom of his rain gauge. Add that to several days of triple digit temperatures that accelerated water loss from his soil and his crop, and his corn is in a sad state. But he's actually relatively lucky, because he is in Iowa, which got some rain early in the season. Farmers in Illinois and Indiana are faring much worse. The 2012 drought is now the worst drought our country has faced in half a century. As of the end of June, a third of the nation was in severe drought, and more than half faced moderate to extreme drought. All in all, June ranks as the 14th warmest and 10th driest June on record. By the end of July, the USDA had declared 1,584 counties in 32 states as primary disaster areas, making farmers and ranchers in those counties eligible for federal relief programs. Analogies to the Dust Bowl are becoming common. Most of the time, Americans don't need to worry much about how the food gets to our table, and whether the weather has anything to do with it. It gets hot, and we put on the air conditioning. It doesn't rain for weeks on end, and we celebrate the sunshine. But now, the fate of the corn crop on Midwestern farms even has comedian Stephen Colbert worried. Agricultural economist Bruce Babcock appeared on his show, warning him that the prices of meat, dairy and eggs will increase because "American livestock are fed a corn heavy diet." As Colbert put it, "It is one thing for global warming to make sea levels rise, but nobody told me it would make my cheese levels recede."