Worst drought in decades in the American heartlands threatens to put farmers out of business

The worst drought in decades in the American heartlands threatens to put farmers out of business - and force up food prices across the world.

Boats sit on the dry cracked bottom of a dry cove at Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, Indiana 

The fields on Eddie Melton's farm in the rolling terrain of western Kentucky should be covered by a thick green quilt of eight-feet high corn stalks at this time of year.

Instead, withered brown plants, barely half that height, are straggling out of the barren soil. The sorry landscape, repeated in states across the American heartlands, is testimony to the worst drought to strike the region for more than half a century "This drought has already devastated the corn crop," said Mr Melton, who farms 1,500 acres settled by his great-great-grandfather in the late 19th century. "We're just praying for some rain to save the soybeans."

The US agriculture department last week designated 1,297 counties across 29 of the 48 mainland states as "primary natural disaster areas".

The debilitating combination of low rainfall and high temperatures has produced America's largest drought zone since 1956, with more than half the country officially classed as suffering drought conditions.

And for many farmers, it is evoking stories from their fathers and grandfathers of the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

In a telling illustration of the drought's impact, a golf tournament in Indiana was halted last week after a player lost a ball down the deep fissures in the bone-dry earth of what was once a water hazard.

Corn and soybean farmers in America's mid-West are reeling. And on the Plains, ranchers are selling off their cattle early and cheaply as they struggle to feed their livestock on scorched prairie pastures after already using up next winter's stores of hay.

Consumers around the globe will encounter higher food prices as a result of the drought ravaging the world's biggest grain exporter. Economists are warning that already-volatile wheat-importing regions of Africa and the Middle East will face potentially destabilising increases in prices.

And domestically, the drought is delivering a fresh economic challenge for President Barack Obama, whose re-election hopes in November have been left in the balance by the country's stuttering recovery from recession.

Indeed, it is not just Mr Melton and his friends who have been hoping for divine intervention.

"I get on my knees everyday and I'm saying an extra prayer right now," said Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, after briefing Mr Obama on the crisis at the White House. "If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it."

The latest bald statistics from his department paint a grim picture. In the 18 corn-growing states hit by the drought, just 31 per cent of the crop is in "good condition" and 38 per cent is listed as "poor/very poor" (the figures for Kentucky are even worse - six and 77 per cent respectively).

Soybean, for which the growing season is slightly later, is faring marginally better at this stage. But with the long-range forecast offering little sign of relief from the skies, that crop could also suffer just as badly by harvest-time.

Indiana is another state taking a beating. At the Huntington county fair in the north of the state this weekend, the talk between the antique tractor parade, pie baking contest and archery demonstrations turned inevitably to the weather - a staple subject for farmers at the best of times, but a topic now of financial survival.

"We have just had our 23rd successive day of temperatures above 90F," said Paul Jacobs, who runs Driftylane farm with his father. "The previous record for consecutive days above 90F was 14.

"We came into spring planting in very dry soil after a mild winter. So there was very little moisture in the sub-soil at that stage. And now we are just desperate for some real rain."

Corn prices jumped again on Wednesday due to the deteriorating conditions, rising to nearly $8 a bushel to extend a rally in which the grain's price has jumped 50 per cent over the past few months.

Mr Jacobs has crop insurance, which covers some farmers for a proportion of their losses. "It's going to take some farmers several years to recover from this financially, even if they do survive. Others are not going to make it."

It has not gone unnoticed in drought-plagued middle America that Britain has been suffering from the opposite extremes of precipitation in the run-up to the Olympics.

"Just send us over some of the rain during the Games," said Mr Melton. "We'll take anything right now."

The impact of the drought has spread beyond farming as a spate of prairie and forest fires have been blamed on the mixture of extreme heat and dryness. In Missouri, there was a report of hay in a barn combusting on its own.

Falling water levels are also taking their toll on the Mississipi and Ohio rivers, two key commercial shipping routes, where operators have had to reduce the size of loads on barges.

But one decorator in Indianapolis has found a commercial upside – he is offering to paint brown lawns green again.