Grafton
“We lost at least $3,000 just in salad mix,” said Suzanne LeBlanc, who has been farming 10 acres with her husband, Ray LeBlanc, since they started Autumn Harvest Farm in Grafton in 2002.
LeBlanc said that early season greens are the cash crop that help tide a farmer over between winter’s frosts and the summer harvest. Some greens are used in their on-site cafe or sold directly to Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, and farm stand customers, but mostly they go to several wholesale accounts.
LeBlanc said the farming has been harder than the couple thought it would — located off Route 4A, the farm is far off the beaten path, and the couple has only recently sought to bolster business by becoming a destination farm through such offerings as a quilt shop and hiking trails.
This season, they planted some crops on mounded, raised beds for the first time, and have learned the hard way that the above-ground beds are particularly susceptible to drying out. LeBlanc said their well is still wet — it’s not so dry that well levels are a concern, yet — but the sprinklers and irrigation systems just aren’t enough.
“We should have been harvesting at least two weeks ago, maybe three,” LeBlanc said. “We got nothing.”
“Oh! It is dry down there,” said Brooke Taber, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington, looking at updated drought maps from the National Drought Mitigation Center.
The map’s key explains that “abnormally dry” is one stage less severe than a moderate drought.
Taber said that in May, the region received an average of 1.1 inches of rain, far below the average of 3.7 inches, and in June to date, there’s only been 1.24 inches of rain, well short of the 2.8 inches that would be considered normal.
“A lot of the local streams and rivers are at abnormally low levels,” Taber said. “There’s an impact on farmers’ crops and how fast they grow.”
Marty Lyman, 66, said he doesn’t own a spoonful of soil, but he still makes about half of his living haying about 300 acres of former dairy farms owned by his neighbors in the Jericho District of Hartford Village.
“We hay it twice or three times, whatever it will shell out,” said Lyman, who also plows snow and delivers sawdust or shavings for animal bedding.
This year’s dry weather has allowed Lyman to cut high quality hay and bale it early, without having to worry about working in soggy fields or rotten hay.
But there’s been less growth in the grass so far.
“The first crop of hay, I’m going to say, was down by about 15 percent,” he said. “Instead of 1,000 bales, I’m baling 850.”
Lyman, who typically sells about 20,000 bales a year for between $4 and $5.25, said sustained dryness could lead to further loss — or a series of showers could allow both his fields, and his bankroll, to green up.
“I think it will sugar out,” he said. “It will be a fairly decent season as long as we keep getting these little showers.”
With climate change reshaping the Earth’s weather systems, looking at the total rainfall for a month, or a season, will be a less and less accurate measure of ideal growing conditions, according to Kevin Geiger, a planner with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Planning Commission who specializes in regulating flood plain development.
Since 1996, there has been a dramatic 84 percent increase in heavy spring showers, according to a study published last year by researchers from several institutions, including Dartmouth College.
An increase in extreme precipitation events can boost total rainfall amounts, but because it is concentrated into a short period of time, most of that water winds up running into the nearest river, rather than sustaining agricultural crops.
“If it all comes in one big chunk, that’s different than a bunch of different rainstorms spread throughout the month,” Geiger said.
With 43 years of farming under his belt, Pooh Sprague of Edgewater Farm in Plainfield said he’s grown his small fruits and vegetables through worse summers, and he recognizes that too much rain can be as bad as or worse than too little.
“I remember (Tropical Storm) Irene,” he said. “It can go the other way pretty quickly.”
But still, he said, every day of dry weather causes another chunk of his potential profits to evaporate into the air. Instead of weeding or fertilizing, his work crews are running around and irrigating their 80 acres from a patchwork of water sources that includes ponds, wells and the river. And all that work, Sprague said, still amounts to a less effective and efficient watering job than a simple rainfall would bring.
“Make it rain, that’s all I ask,” Sprague said. “If we woke up and found puddles in the driveway we’d feel great. We’d feel very blessed.”
With a summer storm predicted to blow through the region this weekend, Sprague said he and other farmers are pulling out their phones several times a day to check their favorite weather app to see whether the future projected rainfalls will edge over into their specific towns.
“On Monday night, a farmer I know picked up an inch in Bradford (Vt.), and we got nothing,” he said. “I lost at the gaming table. But maybe I’ll win this Saturday.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.