Farming Questions

When we first moved here a month ago, I loved driving past all the vibrant green cornfields and beanfields. It's cool to be in the middle of agriculture - sort of helps me remember where the food comes from, ya know?

But now I'm driving past bone-dry, yellow fields of corn and beans. It sure looks like the plants are dead (but I'm not a farmer, so I could be mistaken). And I know my own lawn isn't exactly growing much, which is cool because I don't have to mow it very often (and I don't need to eat the grass).

But the dry yellow crops leave me with many questions. Are the crops really as dead as they look, or is this what it's supposed to look like this time of year? And if they really did dry up and die, is irrigation really that expensive, difficult, etc (i.e. more expensive than losing the whole crop)? Or is this an area where irrigation is normally not needed, but Global Warming came along this summer and that extra two degrees dried up all the crops? Or is this just a normal part of farm life - some years, the crops get all dried up, so you try again next year? How does the economics of this work?

Any thoughts?