Local farmers feeling the heat
Asparagus pops out of the ground at the Food Hub's Educational Farm at Maple Hill in April, but the recent heat wave has parched farmer's fields.PHOTO BY EMILY MANLEY
While local foodies love their locally grown food, the people who grow it are not having an easy time of it in this hot weather, according to the DP’s Bryan McKenzie.
“I just came in from the garden where nothing is growing and where I was tilling dust,” Corky Shackleford, 80, a Stony Point farmer, tells McKenzie. “Everything is brown. You’d think it was winter.”
Indeed, the hot weather appears to be hurting farmers across the state.
“One more week without rainfall and we will be in an extremely critical situation. All crops have stopped growing and are in survival mode. This includes all row crops, alfalfa and grass hay,” Jon Repair, of the Virginia Cooperative Extension Agency in Rockbridge County, tells the DP.
Unfortunately, Jerry Stenger, director of the University of Virginia’s climatology office, says we’re in for more heat and little rain during the next two weeks.
5 comments
This is why it's time to start practicing dry farming techniques. I know some farmers that do in the area and they have been able to ride much of this out in the past. It's never easy, but you can do it. My garden is surviving.
Global warming, we're all gonna die.
I wonder if this article is the newspaper equivalent of the siren song sung by nice restaurants when they start hosting late night dance parties.
This article is just a rip off of the Daily Regress. It's supposed to be the DP that's ripping off your articles. We count on y'all to actually do something other than run AP stories and puff pieces. Don't get soft.
Doesn't the Hook run this story every year? It's hot in the middle of the summer, farmers are suffering, etc. Usually, they link to something in the Valley like the Harrisonburg paper.
Focus yes man.... last year was a very wet year with cooler temps and higher humidity. So how out of touch the average American is these days with the seasons...