Drought in North Central Idaho
For Idaho, Winter 2025/2026 was the second warmest winter since 1896, with record-low snowpack and warm temperatures that accelerated snowmelt a month earlier than normal. Nearly all Idaho’s basins were classified within drought conditions.
My name is Ken Bruegeman. We live here in Grangeville, Idaho. We farm wheat and canola and we do hay and we raise cattle.It's definitely been dry. We had an open, dry winter. The ground water never got replenished because we had, I could only, we had a few inches of snow once or twice all winter. Other than that, it was 40 or 50 and everything greened up earlier. Harvest, we started haying I believe like the 4th or so of June and we were basically done by the 4th of July and a lot of times we don't even start till then and harvest we were actually done by August 1st and usually we don't even start till the August 10th or so and I mean the yields were way down.
There was some protein and quality issues it did do the quality. I think the wheat varieties are getting a little more bred to handle the stress, so the quality was not quite as big of an issue as the past, but the yields were definitely down for our area.
