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• Even farmers who still have crops in the field aren't likely to benefit from rain this late in the growing season. In some areas, farmers who planted corn early in the unusually warm spring have started harvesting.
• "The impact in a lot of places has been done for this year, and any easing will just help things out a little next year," said Mike Brewer, a National Climatic Data Center scientist who put together the latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map released by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
• Brewer's update showed the drought worsening in Kansas and Nebraska even as it eased in other key farming states.
• Overall, the amount of the continental U.S. mired in drought remained about the same at 61.8 percent as of Tuesday. The portion enduring extreme or exceptional drought -- the two worst classifications -- also remained virtually unchanged at 24.14 percent.
• In Iowa, the nation's leader in corn production, there was good news, with the amount of land in the two worst categories of drought dropping 7 percentage points in the past week to 62.05 percent, thanks to recent storms.
• Conditions also got slightly better in Illinois, another key supplier of corn and soybeans, with the amount of land in the two worst drought categories slipping from 81.18 percent to 79.54 percent.
• But in Nebraska, the amount of land in exceptional drought spiked by 19 percentage points to 22.5 percent, and in Kansas, it jumped from 38.6 percent to 63.3 percent.
• The deepening drought continues to strain Ken Grecian, a Kansas rancher who has sold off one-fourth of his 320-cow herd as heat and drought burned up his pastures. He has spent the summer scrambling to find grazing and haul water to his cattle.
• Just last Friday, he peddled 37 more cows at a sale barn and took all his calves to a feedlot to take the stress off his remaining animals. Cows that were nursing had started to lose body fat, and their ribs and backbone were showing.
• Grecian, 62, who lives near Hays, said he feels fortunate he has been able to move the cows he has left to 1,000 acres of conservation land opened for grazing by the federal government.
• "We will find a way to keep these cows through the winter," he said. "I guess the sad reality is we won't know until spring whether we are out of this situation. We have to have precipitation -- in the form of snow and spring and fall rains -- to put enough moisture back in the soil to grow pastureland."

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