Extreme weather can hit farmers hard. Those with smaller farming operations often pay the price
MAYFIELD, Ky. — Justin Ralph estimates he has made about 200 trips this year to deliver grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle. They are accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to transport crops totaling about 800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat to market.
What they are not used to are the distances they have had to travel in recent years, a result of the bad weather that is only expected to increase in their area due to climate change. They used to use a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky – a huge facility that bought and stored millions of bushels of grain from farmers. But it was destroyed in the 2021 tornado outbreak, which killed dozens of people and leveled entire swathes of the city, and the company that ran it closed. Now, instead of a ten-minute drive, they sometimes travel an hour or more.
“The fluctuations in weather conditions that we have… it’s kind of scary,” he said, especially for people with smaller farms. “If you have a larger farm, your acreage is spread over a larger area, so the risks are likely to be more minimized because they are more spread out.”
Farmers and experts agree with Ralph, saying larger farms have more ways to manage risk, but smaller to medium-sized farmers struggle when extreme weather hits. Human-induced climate change is only expected to increase the number and intensity of these extreme events, from sudden droughts to increased rainfall. And as the planet warms, scientists say the country will see more tornadoes and hail storms and that these deadly events will strike more often in densely populated states in the mid-South, a major concern for anyone living in those areas and especially for those who try to do so. sticking to small family farms.
That’s already a reality for the Mayfield area, which sits on a flat coastal plain in the western part of the state and has been hit by extreme weather in more ways than one. In addition to the 2021 tornado outbreak, they were hit by flooding this summer that exceeded 10 inches in some areas, inundating crops.
Keith Lowry, another farmer near Mayfield, woke up one morning this summer to eight inches of rain, and by dinnertime, when the deluge finally stopped, he knew he had a problem.
Lowry found fields of half-submerged corn, soybeans almost completely wiped out by the flood, and rapids cascading from the spillway. Now, at harvest time, he estimates they have lost between five and ten percent of their crop this year. In addition, they had to deal with the debris washed into their fields, a nuisance that hinders heavy machinery.
Lowry has a relatively large farm: 3,000 acres, mostly corn and soybeans, along with another 2,000 acres that his son farms. Although he has suffered some losses, he says he and other farmers are used to dealing with uncooperative weather. “That’s the nature of the beast,” he said.
But without the grain elevator or on-farm storage and limited transportation options, Lowry explained his neighbors would be stuck with soybeans in their fields. That’s why, on a cloudy day in November, he helped on a much smaller plot, reaping a harvest of about 250 hectares.
While farmers and city residents have leaned on each other to be resilient, the compound effect of these natural disasters has had lasting consequences for a community where agriculture is the heart of commerce.
“Because we have such a large county that is really densely populated with grain farmers, the loss of (the grain elevator) has forced them to move to surrounding counties, often 40 to 50 miles away, to transport their grain,” said Miranda Rudolph, the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Agent for Graves County. She said fuel costs have increased, adding to the tension.
Hans Schmitz, a conservation agronomist with Purdue’s extension office, said large farms generally have a wider range of options to offset their risks, including crop insurance, which often costs less per acre when applied to larger areas.
For example, Jed Clark, who farms about 3,000 acres of grain near Mayfield, said he relies on crop insurance and also tries to strategically spread his crop rotations, betting that crops in a low-lying area will do well in a dry year . and that crops on higher ground last longer than those washed away in floods.
If farmers on smaller farms are forced to put everything in a low-lying area that floods, an entire crop could be affected, Schmitz said. Farmers with less land therefore sometimes look to specialty crops such as watermelon or tomato, in an attempt to increase their profits with the acreage they have, but those crops are not as easy to insure.
Schmitz said he thinks climate change is contributing to farmland consolidation — that is, large farms getting bigger. It is relatively easy for a very small farm to get started, but more difficult to keep afloat. “What concerns me is the hollowing out of the center,” he said.
A smaller farm’s ability to survive also has to do with infrastructure, says Adam Kough, another Kentucky farmer who has 3,000 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat (as well as two piggeries and a hundred sheep) between Mayfield and Mayfield. . and Murray. He thinks the farmers who were most injured after the tornado were those who didn’t have grain storage on their land.
Kough said he has noticed changes in the weather over the years, but he thinks a corporate mentality has more to do with why big farms will always get bigger. “People have changed more than the weather,” he said. “Morales have changed in the last 20 years… I call it murderous.”
Yet the weather influences are unmistakable. Schmitz, who also farms about 1,200 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat in Indiana, said he has seen increasing summer humidity promote diseases of wheat, barley and oats in the Midwest. He has seen that higher night temperatures cause more heat stress for most crops. And he said while some farmers turn to irrigation to help them through sudden and intense droughts, he has seen the same irrigation points end up in standing water after intense and sudden floods.
“It goes back to the old saying in the Midwest: ‘If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.’ We’ve certainly always had the capacity for quite significant weather changes in a short period of time,” he said. “But to see climate change exacerbating these potential extremes in both directions in a short period of time is disturbing.”
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Associated Press journalist Joshua Bickel contributed to this report.
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