As you drive along the highway or country roads you might notice fields that look like this. Farmers are harvesting about a month earlier but while some fields have pulled through this year's drought, most others will yield nothing.
"This is not a normal year," Farmer Rock Katschnig says.
Katschnig is in his fields earlier this year.
"We planted earlier this spring and with all the heat and lack of moisture, the crop matured or died earlier," he says.
Katschnig says fields are producing half the crop it's supposed to or less. Fields that used to produce up to 225 bushels an acre are now turning up 150 at best, or even nothing.
"It's a very disheartening feeling when you go over a ridge or into a particular hybrid where there's nothing coming in the corn head, zero," he says.
Corn prices have already reached record highs at around eight dollars a bushel. But just how high it'll go will depend on supply and demand.
"Dollars are going to be huge and it's going to be huge in many states," Katschnig says, "It's hard to tell the impact, it might take a year to figure out the impact of this."
One good thing from this year, farmers are learning more survival tips to handle a drought, lessons that could be put to good use in the future.
"We've learned a lot about hybrids and soil types this year, and crop stress," Katschnig says.
Local farmers will be harvesting fields for about three more weeks, then they'll tally the damage.
