ST. LOUIS (AP) — At a time most years when farmers would be in full swing of planting corn, Stanley Blunier and most other growers near his central Illinois farm still hadn’t begun the annual ritual on Tuesday because fields simply are too wet or too cold to be receptive to fragile seeds.

It’s a scenario playing out across much of the nation’s corn belt, where efforts by farmers to get their crops in the ground still are sputtering — similar to last year, when one of the wettest springs on record got farmers in many states off to the slowest start in decades.