Farmers Hit Hard By Brutal Drought

Most of Tommy Bowles's corn and soybeans shriveled under this summer's long and dry heat wave. But the St. Mary's County farmer fears the worst effects of this year's drought are still to come: Because the soil is bone-dry, he doesn't think he will be able to grow any wheat or barley this fall.

"We need some soaking rain, good soaking rain," Bowles said, echoing the pleas of farmers throughout Southern Maryland. "A thunderstorm is not the answer. A tropical storm is about the only way we're going to break this drought."

The scattered rainfall this week is far from enough to overcome what experts are calling the worst drought to hit the United States in years. From Georgia and Alabama to New England and west to Minnesota and Wisconsin, the hot, dry weather has parched wide swaths of the country.

"This is a real doozy," said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska.

Across the Washington area, the drought has withered gardens and crippled crops. But the effects appear most pronounced in Southern Maryland, where miles of farmland have been desiccated.

Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties are suffering from moderate drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. In Mechanicsville, year-to-date rainfall totals are about nine inches below normal.

"You can drive through the countryside and see that the big row crops are hurt pretty badly," said Jim Shepherd, a Calvert County business development specialist who oversees the farmers market there. "The corn is brown and stunted, and the grass isn't even growing in the middle of the highways."

In Charles County, the commissioners were poised yesterday to pass a measure to limit how often residents may water lawns and wash cars.

"We don't have a limitless supply of water in the aquifers, and we need to be better stewards of that, and we can do that by having better practices," said Commissioner Samuel N. Graves Jr. (D-La Plata).

For farmers such as Bowles, entire fortunes are at risk. He said he normally harvests about 150 bushels of corn per acre, but this year yielded 40 per acre. And he said other area farmers are even worse off.

"This is about the worst drought I've seen since I've been farming, and I've been farming for 33 years," said Bowles, 52, who works about 6,000 acres across St. Mary's. "We just haven't really had any rain at all.

"This thing is getting very critical right now. We see a lot of trees dying in the woods. The deer are eating on our crops because everything in the woods is drying down."

Earl "Buddy" Hance, a Calvert County farmer and the state's deputy secretary of agriculture, said the drought conditions have been particularly hard on livestock breeders who can't afford to buy feed for their animals and have been unable to harvest their own.

"Those guys have cattle out on pastures, and without those pastures, they've had to feed those animals all summer. And they're getting ready to go into winter with no winter feed in storage," Hance said.

He said the corn harvest at his 300-acre farm in Port Republic has been disastrous: He normally harvests 130 bushels per acre and this year harvested about 30 per acre. But, he said, he has faith that Southern Maryland farmers will overcome the drought.

"Our farmers are survivors," Hance said. "They've survived droughts in the past, and we have the utmost confidence that they're going to survive this one."

In August, Maryland was declared a federal drought disaster area by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which allows farmers to qualify for low-interest loans. But the loans are little help to farmers who have lost a year's worth of crops and can't break even.

"Sometimes the drought conditions are so severe there's no way to manage your way through the problems," said Commissioner Gary V. Hodge (D-St. Charles).