This year, April showers brought root disease and product loss.
Athens area farmers are still feeling the effects of the excessive rain that occurred over the summer.
“I’ve been in agriculture 45 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” Rick Vest, the owner of Vest Berries and Produce, said.
Vest said he mainly grows crops such as strawberries, potatoes, squash, tomatoes and red raspberries. He estimated 50 percent of his red raspberries had root disease, and that his total yield, or product, of crops was reduced by at least a third.
Vest said the ideal amount of rainfall for farmers is about once per week, but once it becomes a daily occurrence, like this summer, it starts to cause issues. Some of the problems begin before the crops can even be planted.
“The biggest thing of all for myself and everybody else is you can’t get in to plant everything,” Vest said.
The ground needs time to dry, he said, before farmers can actually get out and plant their seeds, or else their equipment will get stuck in the mud.
Berries will absorb standing water and then burst, Francis McFadden, a Ohio University nutrition professor, said. In addition, fields that stand with water in them too long will rot and grow fungus.
McFadden said because of the high clay content in Athens area soil, fruit trees will completely fall over from “swelling and loosening of rootstock,” and becoming top-heavy.
Each crop has a specific window of time in which it can be planted and still survive, McFadden said.
Some crops have more forgiving windows than others. Green beans, for example, were a crop that most farmers missed the window for this year, Vest said.
Becky Rondy, the co-owner of Green Edge Gardens, an Athens Farmers Market vendor which primarily grows vegetables, said even if crops can be planted in time, the rain still can cause issues.
“If we’re lucky enough to have crops after that kind of rain, usually they’re a little smaller, maybe not quite so flavorful,” Rondy said.
The average rainfall in Athens for the month of June is between three to four inches, according to the National Weather Service. This year, depending on location in Athens County, farmers experienced an average of eight to 15 inches in the month of June — a 200 percent increase in precipitation.
“I think that this year has been an extraordinary year for weather. It's different than any other time that anyone can remember,” she said.
However, farmers aren’t completely at the mercy of mother nature. Vest described a process called “subsoiling,” which involves dragging a blade, usually 30 to 48 inches long, through the field to break up the soil, which “lets the water drain down, lets the oxygen in so the roots can absorb the nutrients and grow deeper which gives you a more healthy plant,” he said.
Additionally, Vest owns indoor grow spaces called high tunnels that allow him to control nearly every factor of the growing process, but they aren’t cheap. He estimated one high tunnel unit would cost around $8,000.
“Anything grown in here is of exceptional quality,” he said. “I can control everything.”
Aside from shielding plants from the elements, high tunnels allow farmers to extend the lives of plants further than they would last in normal, outdoor growing conditions. The tomatoes Vest planted in one high tunnel were planted in January of this year, and continued to yield through spring and into the summer, a lifeline Vest described as “extraordinarily long” for a tomato plant. He tries to produce a yield of 35 pounds per tomato plant.
McFadden said a lower yield isn’t always necessarily a bad thing.
“A lower yield, especially with wine grapes, yields to a much better product,” he said. “So you don’t just want to have a lot of fruit.”
When rain results in purely cosmetic issues, however, local farmers are better off than commercial farmers, McFadden said.
“It’s really a problem commercially because people don’t want to eat that food because it’s not perfect anymore,” he said. “But in the market around here, we kind of understand that people don’t really want ‘shiny’ food anymore.”
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