You know it’s dry when your rubber trees are too stressed for bleeding.

That may sound like gibberish to a North American farmer, but it’s a real problem for folks like Jose Edigar Andrade, who farms in northern Brazil’s Tocantins State. And what’s dry for rubber trees is parched for second-crop corn. Which is one reason local reports cite that state’s producers returning their bags of seed corn—with Andrade cutting his planned 2015-16 second crop corn acres at least in half.

Now, before you race to get as long as you can on corn, it’s worth pointing out that Tocantins isn’t responsible for a whole lot of total Brazilian production, and that it’s a big enough country that a local drought state of emergency doesn’t necessarily change the big 2015-16 Brazilian second-crop corn picture.

Second-crop corn states

In fact, just about all of Brazil’s second-crop corn is split between two states: Mato Grosso up north and Parana down south, both with projected larger planted areas this cycle (Mato Grosso producing 19.9 million tonnes on about 8.3 million acres; and Parana producing nearly 12 million tonnes on five million acres, according to the latest Brazilian federal government estimate.)

Together, those two states are slated to make up 58 percent of Brazil’s total 2015-16 second-crop corn production.

So despite much gnashing of teeth among producers like Andrade, weather problems in a state responsible for just one percent of the season’s projected production simply aren’t drawing much attention.

Missing out

But it’s a bitter pill for Andrade and his neighbors, who won’t be able to fully participate in what’s been a neat little rally in Brazilian corn prices—even after one corrects for the distorting effects of the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and Brazil’s real.

That—like the paucity of rain in Tocantins—is something that’s not supposed to happen in January and February, when prices normally fold under the weight of the incoming main corn crop. After all, Mato Grosso producers have over time learned to simply endure ridiculously low prices for their second crop corn, in which, more often than not, they invested as little as possible, knowing they were producing it mostly for agronomic—not economic—reasons.

This year’s second-crop corn could end up yielding a tidy profit for those producers. But not for Andrade, whose weather is keeping him out of the action without even the rubber trees to fall back on. So you can be sure he’s looking for the weather to bounce back.

Brazilian farmers, for the most part, should enjoy higher profits based on a recent rally in corn prices. Source: Agrolink

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Penton Agriculture.