On May 15, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast that the southwest monsoon would reach Kerala by May 26, five days ahead of the usual date. It arrived on June 4, three days late. That nine-day gap, at the coarsest scale the monsoon is tracked, an entire coastline rather than one farmer’s field, is this year’s monsoon story in miniature. If the model can move nine days at the scale of a state, the room for error at the scale of a single sowing decision is larger still. For the roughly half of India’s cultivated area that depends on rainfall alone, with no canal or borewell to fall back on, that gap is not academic. It is the difference between a crop and a reseeding bill.