Justin Ralph estimates he's made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They're accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans and wheat to market.
What they're not used to are the distances they've had to drive the past couple years, a consequence of bad weather that's only expected to increase in their area as a result of climate change. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky — a massive facility that bought and stored millions of bushels of grain from farmers. But it was destroyed in the 2021 tornado outbreak that killed dozens of people and leveled entire parts of the town, and the company that ran it shut down. Now, instead of driving ten minutes, they sometimes travel an hour or more.
“The swings in the weather events that we have ... that’s kind of scary,” he said, especially for those with smaller farms. “If you’ve got a larger farm operation, your acreage is spread out over a larger area, so the risks are probably minimized more because they’re spread out more.”
Farmers and experts echo Ralph and say that larger farms have more ways to manage risk, but smaller to midsize farmers struggle when extreme weather hits. Human-caused climate change is only anticipated to amplify the number and intensity of those extreme events, from flash droughts to increased rainfall. And as the planet warms, scientists say the country will see more tornado- and hail-spawning storms and that those deadly events will strike more frequently in populous mid-Southern states a big issue for everyone living in those areas and especially for those trying to hold onto small family farms.
That's already a reality for the area around Mayfield, which is in a flat coastal plain region in the western part of the state and which has been hit by extreme weather in more ways than one. In addition to the 2021 tornado outbreak, this summer they were hit by flooding that surpassed 10 inches in some areas, submerging crops.
Keith Lowry, another farmer near Mayfield, woke up one morning this summer to eight inches of rain, and by dinner time, when the deluge finally stopped, knew he had a problem.
Lowry found fields of half-submerged corn, soybeans that had disappeared under the flooding almost entirely and rapids rushing from their spillway like a waterfall. Now, at harvest time, he estimates that they lost between five and 10% of their crop this year. What’s more, they had to deal with the debris that had washed into their fields, a nuisance that gets in the way of heavy machinery.
Lowry has a relatively big operation — 3,000 acres, mostly in corn and soybeans, along with another 2,000 acres his son farms. Although he took some losses, he says that he and other farmers are used to dealing with uncooperative weather. “That’s the nature of the beast,” he said.
Source: wkyufm.org
Photo Credit: gettyimages-scharfsinn86
Categories: Indiana, Crops, Corn, Soybeans, Wheat, Harvesting, Weather