June to October was the 11th-driest such five-month stretch in 128 years for the Upper Missouri and Upper Mississippi basins, according to the National Weather Service.
Researchers want to know how co-locating solar and crops — a practice known as "agrivoltaics" — could benefit farmers and be a salve to a growing strain in the Corn Belt, where rural residents and towns are pushing back on solar projects that can often take farmland out of production.
The so-called dead zone where the Mississippi River dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, an area of low oxygen that cannot sustain life, clocked in at 3,275 square miles this year — below the recent average and smaller than what was previously predicted, but almost twice the target goal set by the Gulf of
