George Foster, a third-generation farmer in Middlebury, cut corn on a neighbor’s farm on Tuesday to help feed his 950 cows after this summer’s drought shrunk his own crop.
The 2,000 tons of additional feed cost roughly $100,000, Foster said, not including the labor of harvesting the corn and trucking it home to his dairy farm. The last time the 2,300-acre farm had to buy extra feed was in 1965, Foster said.
The U.S. Drought Monitor, a national drought mapping project out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, shows that all of Vermont is in a moderate or severe drought, as of Sept. 2. For farmers, that’s making a difficult dairy business even more challenging as they’re forced to haul water and buy feed to keep the cows producing milk through the heat.
Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, the state climatologist, said there are two types of drought in the state right now: a long-term drought that began last fall and a flash drought that began around June 4. Some streamwater gauges and groundwater wells are at the lowest levels ever seen in Vermont since record keeping began up to 109 years ago, according to Dupigny-Giroux.
While this particular drought has not yet been directly linked to climate change, a warming planet, caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels, increases extreme weather events and patterns like heat waves, floods and drought.
Dupigny-Giroux encouraged Vermonters to record what they’re observing with the drought at the University of Nebraska’s Drought Condition Monitoring Observations and Reports; so far, she said, there were only two observations recorded across the entire state.
Jon Lucas, of Lucas Dairy, has been hauling up to 5,000 gallons of water per day from a creek to his farm in Orwell since his three wells started drying up in June. Lucas said a typical milk cow needs to drink about 50 gallons of water to produce 100-150 pounds of milk a day. Some farmers said they’ve lost about ten pounds a day of milk per cow because of the heat, and the lack of feed could worsen the conditions, Lucas said.
“The first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about before I go to bed is making sure the cows have water,” Lucas said, adding that along with being a huge time commitment, hauling the water was mentally draining.
The dry spell comes from a shortfall in precipitation that’s affecting the entire state, but particularly the Northeast Kingdom, Dupigny-Giroux said. Rainfall could hit Vermont through the weekend, she said, but it won’t cure the various types and stages of drought impacting the state.
“It took us a while to get into this drought,” Dupigny-Giroux said. “It’ll take us a while to get out, barring tremendous amounts of rain.”
Depending on the region of the state, it would require roughly six to eight inches of rain throughout a month to pull the state out of the drought, according to Dupigny-Giroux. That much rain would have to make it down through the soil and into the groundwater without being taken up by thirsty plants along the way.
Lindsey Brand, the marketing and communications director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, a farmer-led organization advocating for sustainable agriculture, said the state’s drought particularly impacted livestock farmers.
“We’re seeing a lot of folks who have not been able to do a third cut of hay,” Brand said, referring to a harvesting practice that increases grass yields by cutting the crop throughout the season. “That’s a pretty serious blow on the farm.”
That means farmers like Lucas and Foster, who normally can grow enough to feed their herds, have to buy additional feed, creeping into their already slim margins in the dairy industry, where there are fixed prices for fluid milk that don’t oscillate to meet the needs of the milk producers.
A consolidating dairy industry means there’s a very small number of buyers, and they’re able to set a low milk price, Brand said.
“The choice for dairy farmers is, do they want to sell or not sell their milk?” Brand said. “The price is set for them. They can’t negotiate based on an increased cost of production, so a year like this serious drought situation and buying more feed because cows can’t graze means their already-small margins have shrunk significantly.”
Graham Unanst-Rufenacht, the policy director at Rural Vermont, a small-farmer advocacy organization, said most small-scale vegetable farmers are less vulnerable because they can rely on irrigation. Larger animal operations, however, have struggled to rotate their grazing lands, provide enough feed and access enough water since wetter weather ended in June.
Unanst-Rufenacht manages his own animals to encourage ecological resilience on his Marshfield farm, frequently moving animals in tight groups across his 15 acres. But a drought like this summer’s slows pasture regeneration and can impact how much pasture is available for feed.
Lucas said he’s spending $50,000-$100,000 on feed products like corn, hay and wet brew, a byproduct from making beer, to feed his 300 cows and supplement what he normally harvests from his 900 acres of cropland along Lake Champlain.
Lucas is a first-generation farmer, and he said this is the worst dry spell he’s experienced on his farm since he purchased the acreage in 2012.
State funds could help alleviate the crunch through a proposed Farm Security Fund, said Unanst-Rufenacht.
Originally, the measure requested $20 million annually to support farmers impacted by extreme weather conditions increasing under climate change, but that request was whittled down to $1 million during the last legislative session before lawmakers tabled the bill entirely.
“The exact purpose is that, if there’s an extreme weather event, rather than a business being rocked to the ground, it can receive flexible, quick funding and recover,” Brand said. She said the fund was more important than ever to meet the new paradigm of a changing climate that has swung between two years of horrible floods to a summer largely impacted by drought, along with a smaller spate of floods in July.
“Farmers are on the front line of climate change,” Brand said. “We don’t want to see our agricultural system collapse in the face of this new normal.”
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This story was originally published by VTDigger and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
