Farmers like Richard P. Wysk are calling the summer of 2016 "the worst year" that they have known for their business.
Western Massachusetts farmers like Richard P. Wysk, 51, of Hadley, are calling the summer of 2016 "the worst year" that they have known for their business.
Rainfall has averaged about an inch a month, they say, instead of the needed inch weekly. Wysk's corn has not ripened at his River Bend farm, his melons have yet to appear on their vines and some of his peppers have aborted.
A drought advisory was issued for the Connecticut River Valley by the state's energy and environmental secretary at the beginning of July as the result of "four continuous months of unusually dry weather."
Most of Massachusetts is under a moderate or severe drought.
"It's the worst year on record for dryness. You can dig down five to six inches and not find water. You can't weed and you can't pull plants up because there is nothing behind them," said Wysk as he served long-time customers, like Laura B. Joubert of East Longmeadow, Tuesday at the Farmers' Market at Forest Park in Springfield.
Wysk has been a regular participant at the market since its inception at another location nearly 20 years ago, but not so much this summer when lack of rain has meant for him, and other area farmers, "slim picking for four or five weeks."
David Paysnick has operated Rainbow Harvest Farm, in Greenfield, since 2009. The thirty-six-year-old farmer said that, since he has had "no water source on his property for irrigation," he has "years that challenged, but not like this."
"This is the worst drought I have ever seen," Paysnick said.
"It has made some crops late, some have died and others have slowed down because of the length of this drought. It has been impossible to keep everything watered. It has been a couple of months. We haven't even got an inch a month. Adequate is about an inch of rain a week. We normally average about four inches in June, a little bit less in July, and we have had a total of about two inches since May, if that."
Paysnick has built a water trailer so, when he is "not at market," he can pump two trailer loads of water a day onto his two acres. The effort has kept him supplied with an array of produce to sell at farmers' markets like Forest Park, but he added that it is far from adequate and that the lack of rain makes it hard to grow vegetables like potatoes and "to keep lettuce in good shape."
"We need a good day of long steady rain to get us into a pretty good place for going into fall. We are used to having July and August being very dry some years, but we are not used to going into that with a very dry June," Paysnick said.
Ryan Voiland, of Red Fire Farm in Granby and Montague, agreed this year's drought conditions are "causing a lot of trouble" for farmers.
"It is the worst drought I can remember in my entire life," said Voiland who has farmed for more than 20 years.
Crops, ranging from blueberries to melons to corn, were plentiful inside his busy organic produce stand at the Forest Park market, but he attributed that to the result of "heroic efforts to irrigate" at least 90 percent of his 100 acres and "keep most of our crops alive." He said the effort came at a price as there was not enough produce harvested this week to distribute shares to some 1,000 CSA - community supported agriculture - members. CSA members buy shares in return for a portion of a farm's produce.
"We spent most of our effort doing pipe and irrigation equipment so we could water every day and we got very behind on our weeding and cultivating community projects that usually take a lot of our time," Voiland said.
"We took a lot of the staff that we would have devoted to CSA harvesting to catch up on weeding and trying to water and put the pipe down to save our later summer crops. It is the first time we ever had to do something like that and I hope it was the right decision."
Belle-Rita Novak, manager of the Forest Park market, said that attendance at the Tuesday market, which is open from 12:30 to 6 p.m. near Cyr Arena, has remained high, even if some produce has been less plentiful so far this season.
Customers did seem to be in evidence at the lineup of vendors, including at River Bend where Laura Joubert was looking at the selection of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and beets, and anticipating buying Wysk's corn when it was ready.
"He's my favorite stand," Joubert said. "His vegetables are affordable and good, and his corn is sweet and crisp."