A lot of growers I’ve talked to this spring said April felt drier than anything they could remember in recent years. I pulled the past 14 months of data from the FAWN station at Jay, and the numbers confirm what folks were feeling in the field.

Last year’s planting: Wet at the start, dry at the finish

The 2025 planting season was wet. May brought close to 10 inches at Jay, and June brought over 14, more than double normal. Side-dressing, spraying, and getting seeds in the ground meant fighting the calendar more than the soil moisture.

Then the back half of the year tightened up. From August through November, every month was below normal. November 2025 was essentially a zero-rain month, 0.06 inches, when normal is over 3”. That gave a clean window for digging peanuts and defoliating cotton, but the soil profile never got the recharge we usually count on going into winter.

Winter and spring 2026: Dry, drier, driest

Winter only patched part of the hole. December added back about 6 inches, but January and February were below normal. March 2026 was well below normal too, and April 2026 brought just 0.88 inches of rain at Jay, the driest April on record at the station since it started reporting in 2002. The next driest April was 2011 at 1.92 inches, more than double what we got this year. April normally brings around 5 inches of rain to Jay. This year we came up nearly 4.5 inches short, right in the heart of cotton and peanut planting.

This next chart shows why “we just need an inch of rain” doesn’t always cut it:

The blue bars are rainfall. The orange bars reference evapotranspiration (ET). ET represents the combined water loss from evaporation off the soil and transpiration through plant leaves. Basically, it is how much water the atmosphere is pulling out of a wet field each day. On a hot, dry, breezy spring afternoon, the air can pull as much as a quarter inch a day out of the ground. When the orange bar is taller than the blue, the field is losing more water than it is getting, no matter what last week’s rain gauge says.

In April 2026, about 0.9 inches of rain came in and 4.2 inches went out. That is a 3.3-inch water deficit in a single month, right when seeds were going in the ground. No wonder the dust was flying behind the planter.

The soil moisture data tells the same story:

The orange line is moisture at 4 inches deep, where your seed lives. Late April 2026 bottomed out at about 15%, the lowest reading in the entire 14-month record. Spring 2025 was running 22 to 24% at the same depth.

Where we sit now:

May rain broke it open. We are already over 9 inches at Jay this month, including a 2.7″ event on May 9th. Soil moisture at 4 and 8 inches has recovered to around 25%, and soil temperatures are well above the 65°F that cotton and peanut require for germination.

If you planted late April: the worst is behind you. Make replant calls based on stand count, not what the soil felt like two weeks ago.

If you are still planting: conditions are favorable. Don’t drag your feet, once summer heat sets in, ET will climb fast.

What’s coming next: El Niño is on the way

The dry winter and spring were largely driven by a weak La Niña, which NOAA officially ended on April 9th. The bigger news is what’s lining up behind it.

The Climate Prediction Center’s (CPC) latest ENSO outlook (issued May 2026) says El Niño is likely to emerge in the May–July window (82% chance) and continue through next winter (96% chance for December 2026–February 2027). Some models even suggest the event could be a strong one, though as the CPC notes, ENSO forecasts made in spring carry more uncertainty than other times of year, what they call the “spring predictability barrier.” Either way, a swing back to La Niña is very unlikely.

For Santa Rosa County, here is what that typically means on the ground:

• Summer should run more or less normal for us, our summer rains are driven more by sea breezes and tropical storms than by ENSO.
• The 2026 hurricane season is likely to be quieter than last year, since El Niño tends to suppress Atlantic storms. Still plan for one, just in case.
• Fall and winter 2026–27 should be cooler and wetter than this past year, with more active cold fronts. That should give us better soil moisture recharge heading into 2027 planting, the opposite of what we just lived through. It also means a wet fall is possible during peanut digging and cotton picking, so plan harvest logistics with that in mind.

One important note from the CPC: a stronger El Niño does not automatically mean stronger impacts here. It just makes the typical impact more likely to occur. We will not know how the season is really going to shape up until we get past the spring uncertainty and into the summer outlooks.

If you are not already using FAWN, it is a free tool worth bookmarking: fawn.ifas.ufl.edu. Rainfall, ET, soil temperature, and soil moisture for the Jay station, update daily.

Come by the office or give me a call if you want to talk through what you are seeing in your fields.

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