Lebanon
The hot, dry weather roasting New England caused state officials last week to ask the federal government to declare Grafton County and two other New Hampshire counties disaster areas, so that aid could be released to farmers who lose corn, hay and other crops to the crippling conditions.
“Grafton is in there because their forage crops, they’ve lost over 30 percent,” said Bruce Cilley, executive director of New Hampshire’s Farm Service Agency.
The exact impact has varied from farm to farm, and from crop to crop, but farmers large and small agreed that the hot weather is making them sweat.
Take Geo Honigford, who grows a variety of vegetables on 11 acres of Hurricane Flats, his small South Royalton farm.
“I’m spending all my time trying to get water to things,” he said, calling it the driest summer he’s seen in 20 years of farming.
His spinach is burning up in the glare of the midday sun. Pumpkins are drooping. Sweet corn is two feet shorter than usual. He hasn’t even bothered to plant his regular cover crops of buckwheat and oats, because he knows they won’t take in his dry, sandy loam.
“I have irrigation but I can’t quite swing it around to get everything the water it needs,” he said. “I can give everything a drink but it’s looking at me, saying ‘is that all you have? I need more.’ ”
In some years, he gets three growths of hay, but this year, after a relatively normal first harvest, his second is “almost nonexistent. It’s just burned up.”
The drought also hurts larger operations, like Walt Gladstone’s Gladstone Farm, which has corn on 850 acres spread out over several different townships, including Fairlee, Bradford and Newbury.
“We’re not in dire straits, but certain fields are in big trouble,” Gladstone said.
When he rolls down the road to take stock of his crops, he sees some doing well, but others show signs of stress. In some cases, he said the end result will be smaller ears of corn, and smaller kernels.
Honigford said even a casual observer can see the difference in a corn stalk.
“The corn will pineapple,” said Honigford. “The ears wrap in so it looks like spiky pineapple leaves. It’s trying to lower its leaf space to conserve water, so it can’t get as much sunlight. It’s making a choice. It’s saying survival is more important than growth right now.”
Several farmers, including Gladstone, said the harsh weather was magnifying differences created by localized weather features. For example, a field near the Connecticut River that tends to fog in the morning will be less affected than an area with no fog. And life-giving rains have not been spread equally.
“The other day it was raining in West Newbury but Bradford didn’t get anything,” said Gladstone. “Talk about heartbreak.”
Weather data from the USDA’s weekly crop progress report for New England shows just how localized the weather can be, as the rugged terrain creates nooks and crannies that each deflect or embrace heat and moisture to create their own microclimates.
Lebanon, for example, had a temperature high of 90 last week, and saw two days of rain totaling .78 inches. That matches weather reports from Springfield and Woodstock, but Corinth was significantly cooler, with a high of 83, and only .3 inches of rain.
Those differences add up.
Woodstock has seen just 41 days of rain totaling 10.9 inches since April 1, while Lebanon has had 47 days of rain totaling 12.8 inches over the same time period.
The differences mean that the same crop, planted just miles apart, can fare very differently.
On Thursday, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department warned that the state’s bears were expected to be more active in human-populated areas this year, because the heat had done in much of the natural stores of blueberries and raspberries. But Kesaya Noda said the low-lying blueberry fields of Noda’s Farm in Meriden are naturally wet, which has allowed it to escape unscathed.
“We’ve managed OK,” she said. “It’s just in a wet area.”
Steve Taylor, who has been farming for hay and dairy cows on his 110 acres in Meriden since about 1970 acknowledged that “yields are light,” but was taking it in stride. This year, he said, the high drainage of a sandy soil is a liability, but next year, it could be an asset.
“We get the pendulum swing,” he said. “Some years we’re all complaining about muddy fields. That’s Upper Valley weather.”
Sharon Mueller, produce manager at the Upper Valley Food Co-op in White River Junction, said the drought hasn’t really restricted the flow of produce from local suppliers, at least not yet. But she’d heard weather complaints from suppliers.
“They’ve been using irrigation, and that’s more work for them,” she said. “It’s rained in some places and not in others.”
Ray Sprague, whose parents, Pooh and Anne Sprague, own Edgewater Farm in Plainfield, said it’s been a problem all summer.
He said that there has been an upside — the heat and dryness have kept pests and diseases at bay — but they’ve struggled to pump enough water from two irrigation ponds and the Connecticut River.
Some crops have to be irrigated using a tractor-mounted water tank, which he estimated costs $90 an hour for labor and fuel. “It can add up pretty quick if you’re pumping for four or five hours on a couple nights a week,” he said.
Honigford and Gladstone also said they expected to take a financial hit from the drought in the form of increased irrigation costs and reduced production, though they didn’t know how much it would be.
Cilley said that one crop’s struggle can have a trickle-down effect.
“Last year we also had a very poor second cut of hay, requiring farmers to purchase hay who ordinarily wouldn’t purchase hay,” he said. “Then, a dairy farmer maybe ships more animals than normal because they didn’t have enough feed to get through the winter.”
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced he was releasing $11.2 million in assistance to dairy farmers because of the narrowing margins between milk prices and the cost of feed in May and June.
As a result, $9,700 will be divided among nine dairy operations in New Hampshire, while $26,400 will go to 34 Vermont farms.
Cilley said the disaster declaration will also allow New Hampshire farmers that lost significant yields due to the weather to apply for aid.
Conor Lahiff, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington, said a thermal boundary from the north and a moist airmass from the south are colliding, touching off a sustained Saturday rain that would include thunderstorms and, in some areas, flash floods.
The rain will help farmers in the short-term, but it won’t bring long-term relief, he said.
“For crops, you need to have a longer, slower soaking rain to really get the soil to soak in the water,” he said. “It’s how dry it is. The soil is so hard it almost just acts like asphalt and everything runs off.”
He said that, though its difficult to predict long-term weather trends, he expected the pattern of warmth and dryness to continue for the foreseeable future.
Honigford said every drop helps.
“If it rains,” he said, “I won’t have to irrigate on Sunday.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.