Drought Update
Some of you are wondering how our fields are doing since we mentioned a few weeks ago that we were experiencing a severe drought. We did indeed have one of the driest July’s that I can remember ever experiencing in my 25 years of farming in the Pioneer Valley. Not only was it rainless for weeks on end, but also the temperature was in the upper 90’s for days on end. This caused significant stress for our crop plants, and in some cases for small recently planted or seeded plants that still had only small root systems, we did have some crop death (a cilantro succession, some summer radishes, some lettuce plantings, & a rutabaga field which we have since reseeded were among the worst casualties.) Fields with sandy soil suffered the most, but plants everywhere had a challenge during that period.
We irrigated for weeks on end in order to try and get enough water onto the land where the crops were actively growing, and for the most part due to the extensive irrigation effort put out by our staff, we did save most of the crops from severe drought damage. In Montague Greg and Mike J led up the irrigation effort moving pipes & pumps daily in order to reach all the fields. In Granby Abby, Vinny and most of the Granby crew participated in the rigorous schedule of watering the fields. Our farm mechanic Norris also repaired the pumps numerous times in order to keep them operational with the non stop use. Irrigation can be one of the hardest and most frustrating tasks on a farm, so those who eat Red Fire Farm produce should be hugely grateful to the extra effort put out by these irrigators. Without them there would not be a harvest this summer and fall from most of our fields.
In the last 1.5 weeks we have had a couple of decent thunderstorms which have brought us inches of rain and relief from the grueling irrigation tasks. The plants are much happier now, including the cover crops which we can not justify irrigating during drought. Now we are starting to evaluate the financial impact on the farm from the irrigation effort that we put out. We purchased thousands of feet of extra water tubing and fittings in order to reach all of the fields, hundreds of gallons of gas and diesel to run the pumps, a big new pump to keep up with the pumping needs, and in a few cases tanker trucks of water to save several fields that were dry but had no nearby ponds or rivers from which to pump water. The bills are still being paid and tallied, and the overall expense not yet calculated.
Whatever the expense ends up being, I am confident that the effort was worth the expense (without it we would have had no crops at all), but there is no question that growing the crops this year was more expensive than a typical year due to all the irrigation needs. We are trying to recover some of these costs by charging a little bit more for produce to our wholesale and retail customers this summer than we typically would in a moister growing season. Overall at this point I am just relieved that we have had rain, and that most of our crops are still alive and looking like they will yield a good harvest!
-Ryan