Drought has scorched the livelihoods of some farmers in the northeastern states while only gently parching their neighbors’.
“You can have literally on the same farm, on one side of the road or in one field, enough rain to be OK, and then another field a quarter of a mile away won’t get any rain,” said Henry Talmage, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau Association. With localized weather systems, relief pours down sporadically.
“I think it’s hard to say what’s going to happen,” Talmage said. General weather predictions can’t prepare individual farmers for what’s to come.
Some climatologists have predicted that drought conditions will persist into the fall. From Maine down to Pennsylvania, water shortages began with a low snowfall last winter. The severity of drought varies from region to region.
Cornell University has said this is the driest season Ithaca, New York, has had in the past 100 years. Maine’s Agriculture Commissioner Walter Whitcomb said the state has had about one-third of its normal rainfall, but mostly only the south of the state has been adversely affected.
Dry spells are common in farming, but some longtime farmers describe this as the worst season they’ve seen.
“It’s really gloom and doom,” said Ron Robbins, a dairy farmer in Jefferson County, New York. “I’m generally a pretty positive person. I try to really look beyond adversity, but this is something that’s really taking a toll on a daily basis. It’s really discouraging even to the point of depressing.”
Animal agriculture has been hit particularly hard. Corn and hay have been the most affected crops, and these are the two main sources of feed for livestock.
Robbins will lose at least 40 percent of the corn and hay he’s grown to feed his animals. He said this has been the worst of his 40 seasons as a farmer.
“Everything has turned brown very, very fast,” Robbins said. Farmers who toiled in the fields this spring from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. are now watching the fruits of their labor whither and die, he said.
Many livestock farmers are already feeding their animals with the hay they’re supposed to save for the winter, said Bill Fosher, a pasture-based farmer in New Hampshire and the coordinator of Granite State Graziers, a statewide organization of grass farmers.
In the hardest hit regions, farmers are starting to sell off their animals. Some have enough saved to buy feed from alternative sources, but with similar conditions across the northeast, feed may become increasingly short in supply and high in demand. If a glut of livestock enters the market, it may also become more difficult to sell, or farmers may have to accept low prices.
