Farmers battle hot, dry conditions

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Farmer Stephen Daniels doesn’t have a traditional rain dance.

“My rain dance is going out there and turning on the water pump,” Daniels said on Wednesday.

Growers across Wilson County are facing unusually dry conditions and a lingering heat wave with temperatures approaching 100 degrees many days.

“It’s been a good three weeks since we have had any sizable rain,” said Daniels, who is growing sweet corn to sell at Daniels Farms Produce at 5367 Bloomery Road. “The corn has really, really been struggling.”

Daniels walked all the rows and did a selective harvest of good ears Thursday and will have corn for sale starting Saturday at the produce stand.

This is the time of the year when corn would ordinarily be pollinating, a natural process essential to the formation of healthy ears.

“For every kernel of corn, there is a silk for it,” Daniels said. “For a full ear to be completely pollinated and put on a full set of kernels, each one of those silks has to be pollinated.”

Daniels said that during pollination, temperatures of 93 to 95 degrees will either harm or kill corn pollen.

In addition to partially developed ears of corn, poor pollination causes a general decrease in yield.

“The thing that helps it is irrigation,” Daniels said. “With this irrigation, my goal is not to wet the plant itself, It is to set the ground under the plant.”
Daniels said the corn can survive the heat if the stalks can draw up water from the ground.

“I can’t change the temperature,” Daniels said. “I can’t make it rain from the sky, but I can help the corn be as happy and unstressed as possible by putting out the water that I put.”

Daniels said it is expensive to irrigate his 2 acres of sweet corn. He has been irrigating for three straight weeks.

“I am pumping an hour and a half on each half acre. It takes me about three hours to water a full acre of my sweet corn. I water 1 acre in the morning and 1 acre late in the afternoon,” Daniels said.

He pumps the water out of an irrigation pond on the farm.

That is 13,000 gallons every hour and a half.

“That is equivalent to a half an inch of rain on an entire acre,” Daniels said.

Daniels built the irrigation system from scratch.

“It is so expensive to go out and buy and irrigation set up. I put pipe together that I was able to buy with high school graduation money and different things online,” Daniels said. “I built an irrigation reel to put all my irrigation line on. I have tried to do it as cheap as possible but also do something that would work for me. I am doing everything I can to make it a good product.”

Farming, Daniels said, is like rolling the dice.

“It’s like Granddaddy said. ‘You pay your money, you take your chances.’ Well, these are the chances,” Daniels said. “This is the nature of the animal that we deal with. If it doesn’t rain and I have no way to get a produce crop, I lose money. I lose customers. That’s why we are trying our absolute best and work as hard as we do can to get a crop out. Whether or not, I have got to make a livelihood.”

CRITICAL NEED FOR RAIN

Norman Harrell, director of the Wilson office of the N.C. Cooperative Extension, said it is critical to receive rain soon in Wilson County.

“The high temperatures, low humidity and wind have increased transpiration (water movement) in the plants and made the impacts of the drought worse,” Harrell said. “Corn is significantly affected in the county, and any rain going forward may only help corn that is not tasseling now. Soybeans shut down when it is over 95 degrees. Tobacco growth and development has stopped, and the lower leaves are starting to burn. Farmers need some relief ASAP.”

Farmer David Blalock said the hot, dry weather has been challenging.

“We are operating under very tight margins anyway,” Blalock said. “It is a lot of mental stress on the agriculture community right now.”

High input costs, high interest, high fuel, labor costs, all take away from the growers’ bottom line.

“There’s just not room for any error,” Blalock said. “Old folks used to say that dry weather would worry you, but wet weather would ruin you. And there is a lot of truth in that, but the heat, the temperature, is probably more detrimental on us right now.”

When the temperature gets so high, the evaporative process of the sun is taking more moisture out of the plant faster than the root system is capable of replenishing it.

“That’s when you start having the crop deteriorate, the leaves drying up in the field,” Blalock said. “It is dry, but I have seen it drier before. The temperature is what is damaging the crop and giving us trouble. You see the tobacco leaves are burning on the bottom, so you are losing weight and quality.”

Blalock said the most beneficial thing he can do is get the flowering tops out as quick as possible.

“When you break that top out, that stimulates that plant’s root system,” Blalock. “That makes the plant’s roots deeper. We break that top out to make the plant grow bigger leaves. We sell leaves. We don’t sell seed. It will handle the dry weather a little bit better.”

Tobacco will historically handle this type of conditions better than anything else, he said.

“At this stage of maturity and growth that we are in, the cotton, sweet potatoes and peanuts are probably handling this dry weather the best, but they are all at a small state,” Blalock said. “Their water requirements are not as great. They are probably dealing with this heat better than the tobacco and corn. The corn is probably affected the greatest. It looks like we are dealing with an insurance year on corn and insurance claims on that. If those silks dry before it pollinates, then we are courting with disaster really.”

The corn crop in 2022 was similarly affected by heat and dry weather.

“We have been here before,” Blalock said. “Farming is not for the faint of heart.”

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