In Fayetteville, it didn’t rain for 19 consecutive days in June. And while a rainy July flooded roads in parts of the county, the after-effects of June’s dry period are still afflicting the agricultural community here — and across the state.
North Carolina experienced its driest June on record, according to the North Carolina State Climate Office. Meanwhile, Fayetteville was suffering through its third-driest June in the 120 years that records have been kept at the Fayetteville Public Works Commission’s Cross Creek Water Reclamation Facility, according to Corey Davis, the assistant state climatologist of the North Carolina State Climate Office.
The PWC station recorded 1.11 inches of rain during the month — a full 3.55 inches below the historical June average, Davis said. Meanwhile, temperatures climbed high into the 90s in the final days of the dry month.
“This was a very fast-emerging drought due to the combination of that prolonged stretch of dry weather and the hot temperatures over that same time period,” Davis said.
The lack of rain here was captured in stark terms in weekly updates from the U.S. Drought Monitor. On June 18th, “abnormally dry” conditions, the lowest drought classification, were recorded by the monitor in Cumberland County. Things quickly escalated from there.
“The following week on June 25, the entire county was in Moderate Drought, and by July 9, areas just south of Cumberland County had hit the Severe and even Extreme Drought classifications,” Davis said.
Extreme drought is the second-highest drought category, behind “exceptional drought.”
Some relief in the form of heavy rain showers came on June 30, the end of that 19-day dry spell in Fayetteville, and again on July 1, Davis said. Heavy rainfall followed throughout the month of July — including a 10-day stretch between July 18 and 27 — which Davis said was the area’s longest rain streak since fall 2015. The 7.25 inches of rain recorded by the PWC station in July made it the 39th wettest July on record, he said.
Despite the rain’s return, the drought is still lurking in the minds — and fields — of farmers.
Adam Carter, who has two decades of experience operating a family farm with locations in Eastover, Godwin and Wade, told CityView the June drought was unlike anything he’d seen.
“There’s always spots that kind of miss rain every year, but this year, it’s just been so widespread,” Carter said. “I can’t ever remember being this widespread in this area since I’ve been farming.”
Lisa Childers, director for Cumberland County’s North Carolina Cooperative Extension, told CityView it’s been a “tough growing season” for farmers throughout Cumberland County.
“The county experienced severe drought with high temperatures during the critical months of June and July,” Childers said. “Corn, soybeans and tobacco were some of the most impacted crops across the county. We are seeing stunted, delayed growth and poor pollination.”
The drought has wreaked havoc on farmer’s corn crops in particular; June is a key month for pollination that leads to kernel formation in corn, agricultural and weather experts told CityView.
“But it’s probably about the worst corn crop I’ve ever seen in as wide of an area as I’ve ever seen,” Carter said.
Davis said the drought could have reduced corn yields by 3 to 4% per day.
“After that long dry spell in June, the damage was done,” Davis said.
Carter said it’s “hard to say” yet what the economic impacts will be in terms of crop yield as harvesting hasn’t yet begun, but the outlook is grim.
“Most of it will have to be tried to be harvested, but I would say somewhere around a third to a half of a crop is what I would expect,” Carter said. “And there’s some people in some areas that I have talked to that have already been zeroed out. Their insurance adjusters have said, ‘Hey, just destroy it. There’s not enough out here to justify harvesting.’”
Other impact
It’s not just crop farmers who are harmed by extensive droughts like the June one. Livestock farmers also have to contend with the consequences of weeks of dry, barren pastures.
“Drought affects pasture growth, resulting in less pasture for the animals to eat and requiring farmers to feed hay, which increases their cost of production,” Childers said. “It also has stunted the growth of grass cut to make hay, which makes it more difficult to bale and decreases the nutritional quality of the hay.”
Klaus Albertin is the chairperson of N.C. Drought Management Advisory Council, a group of drought experts from various government agencies in North Carolina which provides weekly recommendations of North Carolina’s drought status to the U.S. Drought Monitor. He said the drought resulted in some farmers temporarily switching cattle from grass to hay diets as pastures dried out.
“There were reports of people already feeding cattle hay — which normally they have some hay in reserve, more for later in the fall or winter — so they’ve had to kind of tap into their backup stores already,” Albertin said. “But again pastures kind of bounce back pretty well. So I think because it was so short, really, the impact wasn’t too bad.”
A chaotic, changing climate
Though experts say it’s difficult to pin down a single cause for the exceptional dry conditions, one factor could be more frequent and erratic weather patterns brought on by human-induced climate change. Albertin said the state climate report, as per Executive Order 80, shows that irregular and extreme weather will be more prevalent as the globe warms.
“One of the conclusions was that we’re going to see wet, wet periods and dry, dry periods more often and it’s going to be much more variable,” Albertin said. “So you can’t really attribute any one event to climate change, but kind of the patterns that we’re going to see of up and down, we’re moving away from having half an inch, an inch of rain every week, to five inches over a couple days and then nothing for three weeks.”
Farmers like Carter have noticed the increasingly chaotic nature of weather patterns in recent years. The sudden switch from severe drought to heavy precipitation over the course of the last two months amounted to a sort of “weather whiplash,” Carter said.
“We have four or five weeks of just rain every other day, every three days, and then when it cuts off, bam. We’re, like, four or five weeks with nothing,” Carter told CityView. “And I’ve seen that in the past couple of years — you go through periods — but this one has definitely been longer than anyone that I’ve been through.”
Looking ahead
The sudden switch to heavy rains in July has also been a “remarkable change from one extreme to another,” Davis said.
“The bigger concern now isn’t slipping back into drought, but seeing even more rain, especially if and when the tropics get more active and any of those storms or their remnants potentially come our way. We know all too well what happens when heavy rain from a hurricane falls on already saturated ground. It happened in Cumberland County back in 2016, when up to 10 inches of rain fell in some spots at the end of September, then Hurricane Matthew came along a week later and brought another 10 inches or more.”
“While the recent rain may have come too late for some of the corn, it has been a nice benefit for other crops,” Davis said. “Tobacco, soybeans, and hay fields across eastern North Carolina have all sprung back to life over the past few weeks.”
Childers also noted the rain has helped some crops bounce back. For others, like corn, not so much.
“While we did receive some rainfall mid-July, some crops were too damaged making it unlikely for them to recover,” Childers said.
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. To keep CityView Today going and to grow our impact even more, we’re asking our committed readers to consider becoming a member. Click here to join.
