Extreme weather of 2020 producing pain in Hampton Roads’ croplands

As if 2020 hasn’t been tough enough already, extreme weather is producing pain for local farmers.

Not you too, Mother Nature.

Indeed.

City folks on a drive through the countryside might not notice, but a growing season that’s bounced between way too dry and way too wet has left a patchwork of damage across the region’s croplands.

All those acres of rustling corn? They look OK from a car window, but closer inspection on a slew of farms finds a lot of cob with missing kernels.

Those fields of soybeans? On one side of a road, plants might be lush, uniform and waist-high. But on the other side, they’re stunted, choked with weeds and barely recognizable.

In a year like this, a few feet of elevation or a few miles in one direction or the other made the difference between boom or bust.

Local grain farmers rely on rain to water their fields — no expensive irrigation — and precipitation has varied wildly across the region.

In late May, when soybean seeds usually go into the ground, bone-dry soil in Virginia Beach delayed planting. Meanwhile, soggy soil did the same thing right next door in Chesapeake, as well as 20 miles across the Bay in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. Faced with late starts, farmers already were resigned to less-than-ideal yields.

Then came July — one of the hottest on record in Hampton Roads with barely a raindrop on the radar. Soybeans in lower-lying areas held on better, but the young crop largely wilted. And corn — mostly animal feed varieties are grown here — suffered a widespread blow. Corn needs rain to pollinate and produce kernels, and arid weather curtailed the process across large expanses.

“Our corn is devastated,” said Ursula Deitch, Northampton’s agricultural extension agent, who’s trying to get the county’s 9,000-acre crop declared an official disaster. “I shucked three stalks right next to each other and the pollination was so bad it’s not even harvestable. It’s awful.”

Tropical Storm Isaias, in early August, delivered the next twist. The storm dumped up to 8 inches of rain on Southside crops, but barely dampened the dirt in Northampton, where soybeans thirsted for more.

“We got about an inch,” Deitch said last week. “And we really haven’t had a whole lot since.”

Meanwhile, the “faucet” refused to turn off over Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, said Roy Flanagan, the extension agent for Virginia Beach, where the economic impact of agricultural products reached $139 million last year.

Isaias, Flanagan said, kicked off a weekslong stretch “where we just got rain all the time.”

Too much moisture can be as deadly as too little. Roots are starved of oxygen. Fungus thrives.

In such saturated conditions, the advantage swings toward plants on higher ground but “even on our ridge land, we’ve got soybeans with water damage,” Flanagan said. “We hardly ever see that.”

Whiplashed by the extremes, “it doesn’t matter whether you’re the biggest, most meticulous farmer or one of the smallest,” Flanagan said, “every single one of us is having some issues.”

Johnny Knowles, a third-generation farmer in Chesapeake, cultivates 650 acres of corn and 1,400 of soybeans in the Hickory area. While it’s clearly too late to help his corn, he’s wrestling over soybean decisions.

In a good year, Knowles harvests about 50 bushels per acre, but half of his current soybean crop has been so “seriously affected” by all the ups and downs it’s “lost its potential.”

“Is it worth investing more money into?” Knowles wondered, to spray for pests or disease or apply more fertilizer. “I mean, I’ve got to try to raise something, but at what point do you cut if off and let it go?”

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Like many farmers, Knowles has paid for crop insurance. In October, he’ll harvest what he can and count on insurance to cover his costs.

“It keeps you from going broke,” he said, “so you can play again next year.”

Still, if Mother Nature would just behave “and we get some nice weather over the next six weeks, things could turn out a little better,” Knowles said. “It’s like a soap opera: To be continued.”

In Northampton County, farmers, like everyone else, are “ready for 2020 to go away,” Deitch said.

Farming is always a challenge with no shortage of things to complain about, acknowledged Watson Lawrence, the extension agent for Chesapeake.

“But this year,” he said, “we really mean it.”

Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com