Over at the Daily Globe newspaper in Worthington, Minnesota, an article discusses the utility of cover crops for farming in the state.  This initiative is positive.  As long as they are economically beneficial, cover crops can provide a range of benefits to farmers – and their use should be encouraged.

But the climate change angle just had to be thrown into the story:

Liz Stahl, University of Minnesota Extension crop specialist, has worked with all three crop producers this past year on a demonstration project for cover crops.

Stahl showed a picture of a gully created in a farm field after a heavy rain, with pounds of topsoil ending up in the adjacent ditch.

'As you look at climate changes ... Minnesota is one of the areas that is going to be more affected by these significant rain events,' said Stahl. 'I think we really need to work at this.'

Minnesota has some solid climate data around the state dating back into the 1870s for some of its climate sub-regions. Using the same methodology as the National Climate Assessment, here are the number of heavy downpours per year for each of Minnesota's climate sub-regions back to the start of their respective continuous records.

None of the climate sub-regions has a significant trend in the number of annual heavy downpours since records began, nor since 1970, nor over the last three decades.

Nor are there any significant trends in the maximum annual 1-day precipitation amount, either, over any of these time frames in any of these climate sub-regions.

Cover crops may be a good thing, but the climate alarmism surrounding them in Minnesota is not.