COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio experienced intense heat and wildfire smoke, but rains improved soil moisture levels for the week ending July 2, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Farmers were forced to prepare for the extreme weather.
“Smoke from wildfires in Canada adversely impacted air quality in Ohio. This has led to air quality alerts for several areas,” the report said.
Spectrum News agriculture expert Andy Vance said the data is important for many areas of the agricultural industry.
“The idea is to provide the industry, the marketplace with some idea of what’s happening out there in the field,” Vance said. “Then the market can price all of those things into to what the cost of those goods should be based on supply and demand and so on – really important piece of data that the department gives us each week.”
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor report 75.2 percent of Ohio was considered as abnormally dry or worse.
“[This is] an improvement over last week’s 80.2 percent rating,” the USDA report said.
“Well, the thing you could say is that that rain came not a moment too soon because if you’ll recall, it wasn’t too many weeks ago we were talking about drought, pretty much gripping not just Ohio, but really across major portions of the country,” Vance said.
According to the report, topsoil moisture conditions were rated 3% very short, 18% short, 68% adequate, and 11% surplus.
