Current pictures of drought devastation

While the worst portion of the 2012 drought is hopefully behind us (that was July, when it was over 100 degrees almost every darn day), we'll still in the midst of it.  We did receive some rain with the cooler temperatures that arrived in early August, but it only amounted to an inch or two total (for all of August so far).  Still, that's more rain than we received in June & July combined, so I'll take it!

Unfortunately, the crops were so devastated earlier on in the season that most were just not able to hang on.  I'll share some pictures & details of where our farm season is at this moment, but first I'll tell you what we lost early on & I have no pictures of (really, it was so hot, sad, overwhelming, & depressing at the time that the last thing I wanted to do was take pictures of it all).

Earlier on, we lost:  our red, white, and red cooking onions... all of them.  Our potato crop... all of it.  Our melon crop... all of it.  Our 2nd, 3rd, and 4th plantings of green beans (luckily, that "early" late April chance planting paid off so our CSA did get some green beans).  Our broccoli & cauliflower plantings gone.  90% of our cabbage crop was lost.  All of our heat-tolerant summer lettuce crop bit the dust.  75% of our beets.  99% of our winter squash crop.  Many other crops never even sprouted when I planted seed.... they never even emerged from the ground.

Those crops that did survive showed much lower yields, insect damage, and disease.  And all this was with irrigation.  Water from a hose, sprinkler, drip tape, etc. is just not the same as rain, as I've heard many other farmers agree with me on that this summer.  It can only do so much... it's like a band-aid.

Enough of the negative talk, though.  Our Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA) survived so far!  By closing our farm store & dropping farmers markets way back in late June / early July, we were able to salvage enough vegetables, fruits, and herbs to fill our CSA customer's shares each week, and still going.  Once again, we've had no rain for about 2 weeks now, and temps are back in the 90s.  Since I've finally been able to get fall crops & seeds in, I'm desperately hoping for rain this weekend.... there's a 50% chance.

Here is the state of some of our farm crops today.  You'll notice many weeds.... that's because once these crops were lost I saw no point in weeding them anymore.  Plus in July when the heat index was 110 degrees, the absolute last thing anyone wanted to do was weeding... or anything else outside besides watering the farm animals 6 times a day just to keep them alive.

Here is our winter squash patch.  Dead.  Irrigated at least once per week during the worst of the drought, and it was simply too weak... and pests attacked.  Vine borer bugs, squash bugs, and stink bugs took it all down.  This is what a winter squash patch looks like in October... and this picture was taken in mid-August.  You should be seeing hundreds of squash laying on the ground. I see about a dozen.

Drought devastation in winter squash patch, August 2012.

Next up is our cabbage.  We lost about 90% of it.  The surviving crop that was somewhat decent (though very small heads) was given to our CSA members in 2 weeks of shares.  We stopped weeding the cabbage patch back in late June, when it became apparent that it wasn't going to survive well.

A fancy variety of lavender eggplant.  Just absolutely fried in the heat & drought.

Our zucchini, patty pan, and summer squash finally bit the dust a week ago, along with our cucumbers.  I watched as disease took it's toll on the weak plants, killing them off one by one down the row.  We had about 100 plants of summer squash total, now all pretty much gone.

There are cracks all over the farm.  The ground began cracking wide open back in June, and got really bad in July.  Cracks in the ground... some of the cracks are many feet long, and my sons and I have often wondered just how deep the cracks might go.  Here is a picture of a small crack in the herb garden.  And, funny enough, the green strip that you see at the bottom of the picture is sprinkler tape irrigation. 

The Bright Spots!
The tomatoes, peppers, kale, swiss chard, garlic, sweet onions, some herbs, and a few other crops have held on fairly well!  Granted, they're not doing great, but they're producing enough for our farm's 35-member CSA program as well as our family. 

Now, let's hope for some rain soon, so that in 2 months time I can show you pictures of beautiful fall crops, gorgeous lettuces, greens, spinach, and many radishes.  My fingers are crossed... are yours?

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Major Losses. Farming in a severe drought.

I've not blogged much about the state of our farm this summer.  I am usually an upbeat, positive person... however I'll be honest that this year's extreme drought and extreme high temperatures have taken me down a notch or two.  I haven't felt much like talking about it. 

Where we stand now:  last week our county here in NW Illinois was "upgraded" on the Drought Monitor Map to "Extreme Drought".  There is only one category that is worse than "extreme"; I'm hoping we don't reach it this summer but really nothing will surprise me anymore in a year like this.  What this means on a small family farm like ours that grows "specialty crops" (vegetables & fruits) .... there is no such thing as crop insurance for farms like ours.  Crop Insurance is for farms growing grain (corn, soybeans).  So, even if we wanted to purchase crop insurance, there is none available.  This means, in a year like this... we lose, and lose big.

So far, about half of our crops have been completely lost.  All of the cooking onions (meaning the regular red, yellow, and white onions), most of the potatoes, summer lettuces, broccoli, melons, most of the cabbage, on and on.... were a victim of the drought.  The high temperatures are also a huge factor.... in heat like this, crops don't grow well.  Crops like zucchini & cucumbers are showing very, very low yields (for example, I'm seeing perhaps 10-20% of a normal year's yield (meaning we're getting about 10 cucumbers per 100, where last year we would have seen 100).  Now, this weather is also perfect for pest attacks.  The plants are weak from the extreme heat and lack of rainfall.  Our irrigation attempts didn't make a dent.  The bugs began to attack..... our winter squash patch is dying (vine borers & squash bugs), the cucumber plants that have survived thus far are being devastated by cucumber beetles, on and on.

In an attempt to salvage what we could, in late June / early July, I closed our Farm Store and stopped attending Farmers Market.   After serving our CSA program (Community Supported Agriculture program, customers pre-pay for a season of vegetables, and this is the most important aspect of our farm's sales)... after serving these customers, there simply wasn't much left for the farm store or farmers market.  We stopped accepting farm interns the first week of July, there simply was no way to justify the expense of feeding & housing workers when there was such a reduction in income & sales.

Still, not much rain has fallen (we had a few showers, and I hoped it would make a difference, but 1/10 inch of rain, when you're probably 12" short, just doesn't do anything).  Now it looks like our CSA program will be hit.  Most likely there will be no fall CSA program, we attempted tilling & planting some seeds in early July.... nothing is germinating in these conditions, even with irrigation & a few sprinkles of rain.  I have flats & flats of beautiful fall-crop seedlings that I raised.... however I can't transplant the fall seedlings out in soil this hot & dry - they'll simply die.  Right now I'm just hoping to make it through the remaining 8 weeks of the summer CSA, filling the shareholder's CSA shares.... and if I can't make it through that far, I'll be offering all of our CSA members refunds of their remaining weeks.  And then refunding those who already paid for the fall CSA season as well.  I was down in the dumps for several weeks about all of this.... yes, this is my 4th year of farming, 2nd year of CSA, but this was our 1st year of major expansion - we bought the farm last year, bought so much equipment, invested heavily in upgrading buildings, renovated a falling-down mobile home into a farm store, expanded our CSA program, renovated a mobile home for intern housing, on and on.  We're set to incur heavy losses this year.  Very heavy.  However, I'm now past the sorrow and have simply accepted that this is a horrible growing year, and despite our best efforts at fighting the drought, irrigating as best we could, giving it our all... in the end it was simply and completely out of our hands.

I learned 2 weeks ago that I wasn't alone.  I was contacted by a farmers market in Chicago, a market that I had looked into earlier in the season as a possible outlet for our excess produce.  The very kind market manager was contacting me, hoping that our county wasn't affected by the drought, as she was desperately looking for vendors.  So many of her farmers had pulled out of farmers market due to the drought.  I was saddened to tell her that I was in the same boat.

Then, this morning I read an article in our local paper.  It discusses 3 vegetable farms just over the border in Wisconsin (one it mentions only in the image caption, they have lost ALL of their crops and just shut down their CSA program).  I'm familiar with all 3 of these farms, and have even visited 1 of them.  These are big operations.... dozen of employees, selling to the Chicago region as well as Wisconsin.  They're all on their knees... and I was shocked that one has lost everything & shut down the CSA.  If you'd like to read the article yourself, I couldn't find it on our local newspaper's web site, but it was an AP article, and so I found it here.  It's national news, believe it or not:  http://www.ktvu.com/news/ap/indiana/small-farmers-struggle-as-drought-kills-vegetables/nP698/  .

While it was a relief to know the other area vegetable farmers are in the same boat... it still won't change the outcome of this growing season.  And that's a shame. 

Drought

I saw an article that says this drought now rivals the 1930s... Dust Bowl years. What a horrid growing year this has been.

Over the weekend I began to dig our potato crop. Some of the potato plants had NO potatoes growing beneath them. Now I can comprehend what our ancestors went through in years of famine.

Thanks to our modern methods of food distribution, foods shipped here from all over the world will keep us all alive this winter. However, years ago this drought would have caused such a catastrophic famine that so, so many people would have died.

It's rough going this year...