From drought to deluge, weather whipsaw frustrates NC farmers

Thanks to widespread rainfall across the state, the number of North Carolina counties in severe drought this week fell from 26 to just five.

Last week, two counties — Yadkin and Columbus — were in an extreme drought. Both have been demoted this week to severe. Even so, the federal government has issued a natural disaster declaration in Columbus County.

“We’ve now started having spotty rains (in Columbus County), but the damage has already been done,” state executive director of the Farm Service agency Bob Etheridge told Carolina Public Press .

“The benefits that flow from the declaration are in the pipeline. Emergency loans for farmers are becoming available. And in the cases of animals like cattle, those farmers are eligible for funds to help them offset costs of things like lost hay.”

Counties contiguous with Columbus — Bladen, Brunswick, Pender, and Robeson — fall under the same declaration, so farmers in those counties have access to the emergency loans as well.

For now, emergency loans are the only kind of assistance available, but the Farm Service Agency is working on potential future programs and other kinds of aid.

From drought to damp

It has been a summer of extremes across much of North Carolina.

Williamston, the county seat of Martin County in the Coastal Plains, experienced its second-driest June on record. Now, it is setting the pace for its second-wettest July on record, with 9.06 inches of rain so far this month.

“Things are improving almost as quickly as they degraded,” Klaus Albertin , chair of the North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council, told CPP.

“Some stations … have had their top five wettest 30 days on record. It’s very hard for a lot of systems to adjust to that kind of switch from super-dry to super-wet.”

“These sharp, quick changes from dry to wet are happening more often now,” Corey Davis , drought expert at the North Carolina State Climate Office told CPP. Davis is concerned that, by the end of the year, the most severe drought in recorded North Carolina history will look like just a blip on the radar.

Some areas across the state — including a central band of counties along the South Carolina line, Robeson, Scotland, and Richmond — have received between 10 and 15 inches of rain in the last two weeks. The state average for those two weeks is a little over 2 inches.

“It’s just going to take some time to assess how helpful the rain really was to agriculture,” Albertin said. Rain that falls on dry soil has a greater tendency to run off or flood rather than be absorbed by the soil, and in turn by crops.

“We certainly are happy that it’s rained,” Trey Cash , economic development director of the agriculturally driven Greene County, told CPP.

“But now, we’re worried about getting back into the fields. If you get 2 inches every day for a couple of days, like we did, the standing water makes it so that equipment like tractors and trucks get stuck. There’s obviously a lot of fungus that grows. Tobacco farmers can’t do their maintenance sprays or get into the field to prime.”

“But it’s too late for our corn crop here,” said Cash, voicing a sentiment that rings true across much of the state. However, he thinks the yields for both tobacco and peanuts will be rescued by recent rain.

Dry conditions continue to plague some areas, however, such as Yadkin County in the northwestern Piedmont, which as of last week, was experiencing extreme drought alongside Columbus County.

As rains started to fall in the Coastal Plains and southeastern region of the state in the early days of July, portions of the northwestern Piedmont continued to remain relatively dry. Plus, the sandy soil of eastern North Carolina has an easier time re-saturating than the clay soil of the Piedmont.

“As we look at some of the deeper soils of the northwest Piedmont, we see that it hasn’t seen the sort of moisture recovery that the upper layers of the soil have had, or that the soil column across eastern parts of the state have had,” Davis said.

“And of course, they’re still in that severe drought level this week.”

Five counties remain in severe drought:

• Columbus County
• Davie County
• Forsyth County
• Stokes County
• Yadkin County

“It really hurt our corn crop down here in Yadkin County,” the county’s field crops extension agent Ryan Coe told CPP. “You typically want to see corn at least head high, but it’s not even shoulder high, and there is no ear on the plant. If there is an ear, there’s just no kernels on the ear. We might not get even half of the yield potential.”

Yadkin County has received around three inches of rain in the last week, just above the state average.

“I can really tell a difference over the last few days,” Jason Walker , department director of Yadkin County Soil and Water Conservation, told CPP. “The rain is a good kind of rain, a slow drizzle. It’s too late for some of the crops, but the water is definitely helping.”

Albertin says the long-term forecast calls for above-average rainfall to continue across the state through the next few weeks.

Eyes on the tropics

“That’s not even taking into account the forecasted above-average hurricane season, which we haven’t really seen anything of yet,” Albertin said. “If we get a good hurricane, that’s really going to swing things far to the other side.”

“We’re about a month and a half away from the typical peak of (hurricane) season,” Davis said.

“It’s expected to be a pretty active season this year. And we’ve got a lot of past experience with having these storms drop a lot of rainfall right after we’ve already been pretty wet,” he said, referencing the flooding of Hurricane Matthew in 2016 or Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd in 1999.

“The rain we’ve had lately is nice. I’m certainly not going to wish any of that away. But being this wet at this point in the season definitely starts to make you wonder what comes next, and if it’s more rain, where’s all that water gonna go?”