Wet spring followed by severe drought: A season of extremes for farmers

PLAINFIELD — It has been a growing season of extremes for Upper Valley farmers.

First, the wet spring delayed planting, and now a major drought is starting to have an effect on later-season crops, including apples and pumpkins.

“I don’t care what you want to call it, this isn’t normal,” said Paul Franklin, who owns Riverview Farm in Plainfield.

The whiplash to extreme drought from the oversaturated soils of spring is having a mixed impact on harvests across the Upper Valley. Blueberries, for example, liked the wet spring, and in places where farmers can irrigate, crops still are doing well. And the dry conditions deter disease.

Still, farmers are suffering crop losses in fields that irrigation lines can’t reach, and overall yields are down.

Riverview Farm sits on the bank of the Connecticut River. It offers pick-your-own fruit throughout the warmer months, including blueberries, raspberries and apples.

“We have a light apple crop this year,” Franklin said last week.

That partly has to do with the growing cycle of apple trees, when some varieties have better years than others. Trees that are having an off year are having a worse year than they would without the extreme weather conditions.

The entire Upper Valley saw 4 to 5 inches more rain than normal this past May, with Sullivan County averaging a 5½-inch “departure from normal,” according to data from the National Weather Service.

“Pollinators during bloom time were too wet. The bees weren’t flying as well,” Franklin said. “All these things, there’s always a flip side.”

Now, Plainfield, like other towns in much of the Upper Valley, is experiencing “extreme drought” conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. As of Thursday, extreme drought conditions spread to Orange, Windsor and Rutland counties in Vermont.

Some areas of the Twin States got as much as two inches rain Thursday, according to data from the National Weather Service. However, the recent rain showers are not nearly enough to make up for the lack of rain from the previous months, Hunter Tubbs, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Gray, Maine, bureau, said in a Thursday morning interview.

According to data from the agency’s Concord climate station, New Hampshire’s capital city only had 7 inches of rain from June through August, the 25th lowest summer rain total since records started being kept in 1868.

Water source

For Riverview Farm, the lighter trees with fewer apples mean the fruit is less prone to falling early from trees due to the dry conditions. Trees that bear more fruit and have more shallow roots tend to be hit harder by the drought because more water is needed to support them.

“We have fewer apples, but the size of the apples are quite good,” Franklin said. “We have fairly deeply rooted apple trees and in a dry year that helps.”

During a drought, irrigation tends to pose the biggest challenge for farmers, Heather Bryant, a field specialist at the University of New Hampshire Extension Grafton County Office in Haverhill, said in a phone interview last week.

“It can be a lot of work for farmers and lot of planning to figure out how to irrigate everything, particularly if your water sources are being stretched,” she said.

The potato crop at 4 Corners Farm in Newbury, Vt., was a near failure this year because of the drought, owner Bob Gray said in a Monday phone interview. Due to the location of the 2-acre field, workers couldn’t get the farm’s irrigation system to stretch to the potato crop.

The dry soil also caused the crop to get “scab,” a bacterium that causes lesions on the surface of the potatoes.

“There were quite a few potatoes, but they were really small, golf-ball sized,” Gray said, adding that the farm lost at least $50,000 in potatoes. “Had we been able to irrigate it, it would cool the soil and scab doesn’t like moist soil, so it’s a double whammy.”

Other crops at the farm have been thriving.

“Our strawberries now are doing beautifully because there’s not much disease that likes hot, dry conditions,” Gray said.

Franklin’s raspberry crop is also doing well due to irrigation from the Connecticut River.

“We have the best raspberry crop I think I’ve ever seen,” Franklin said. “If you can get moisture to things, this 70 to 80 degree weather is wonderful for growing things. You don’t get a lot of the fungal diseases you would get if you had a damp year.”

In many ways, 4 Corners Farm is lucky, Gray said. It uses a drip irrigation system for most of its crops, which is built into the ground and uses less water than more traditional overhead systems, he said.

The farm gets water from its irrigation system from a brook that’s a tributary of the Connecticut River. Due to low water levels, it has become more challenging to pump water from the brook.

Gray, who has been farming for around 50 years, said that this year’s drought “is the worst by far” that he has ever seen.

He is particularly worried that, if it does not rain before the ground freezes, underground wells will not get replenished because the water will not be able to penetrate the frozen ground and instead run off into the the brook and river.

“It’s scary,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

Weather impacts animal feed

Farmers who rely on hay to feed livestock are facing challenges. Will Gladstone, who owns Newmont Farm, a dairy farm, in Bradford, Vt., with family members, said that workers will not be able to do a fifth cut of hay as a result of the growing conditions.

“There’s nothing there to get,” Gladstone said in a phone interview last week. The fourth cut of hay was 30 to 40% of what it is in a year without drought conditions.

He is monitoring the corn silage crop, which is also used to feed the farm’s 2,600 milking cows, and is scheduled to be harvested soon. Corn that is planted in lighter and sandier soils is doing worse, with those fields under “incredible stress,” Gladstone said. They are buying an additional 70 acres of crops from another farmer, in part, because of the drought conditions and there is a chance they will have to explore other sources of feed.

“At this point I think we need to see what type of inventory we get after our corn silage harvest,” Gladstone said.

Since his parents bought farm in 1988 “this is the driest we can ever recall,” Gladstone said. “Hopefully our wells can continue to produce. That’s definitely a concern.”

Newmont’s pumpkin crop, on the other hand, is doing quite well.

“This is one of the best pumpkin crops we’ve had in the last three or four years,” Gladstone said. “Within reason, drier is better for pumpkins.”

Cover crops — which farmers plant on already harvested fields to provide nutrients to the soil — are a concern for both Gladstone and Franklin.

“You’d like to go into the winter with all your cover crop fields having some vegetation on them,” Franklin said, including winter rye and clover. “If you put seeds out there right now without any moisture, the birds will pick them clean.”