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Rain swamps farmers' hopes for summer crops
By Kalea Hall
YOUNGSTOWN
Ward Campbell doesn’t gamble at the casino, but he does gamble every day on his 1,000 acres of farmland in Ellsworth Township.
This year has dealt Campbell a rough hand.
“We just have to get by and hope things are better next year,” Campbell said.
Excessive rainfall in June pushed back Campbell’s hay harvest, interfered with fertilizing the corn and drowned some of his crops.
“We should have a second crop [of hay] harvested and we haven’t been able to get the first crop completely harvested,” Campbell said. “The ground is so wet we can’t get on it to mow it. We need 10 days of nice weather to be able to mow the ground while it’s dry.”
Campbell doesn’t know if he will get those 10 dry days.
Eric Wilhelm, chief meteorologist at 21 WFMJ-TV, The Vindicator’s broadcast partner, expects the second half of July to be drier than the first.
“Well, the pattern overall is going to be pretty unsettled and that means we are going to have a hard time streaming together consecutive dry days,” Wilhelm said.
June 2015 holds third place for highest amount of rainfall with 9.02 inches on record at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna Township. But other parts in the area saw up to 12 inches of rainfall, Wilhelm said.
The average rainfall for the month of June is 3.88 inches. June 1986 takes first for wettest June with 10.66 inches.
In July, 0.84 inches of rain fell at the airport, but some areas have seen up to 2 inches so far.
“You drive out and look at farms and you are seeing crops in all different stages,” said Eric Barrett, Ohio State University extension educator. “You will see one field with four-foot plants and another with one-foot plants.”
The impact of excessive rain is a loss of product for farmers, which translates to a loss of profit.
Campbell’s phone is constantly ringing from horse owners looking to find quality hay.
“We sell a lot of hay to horse people and it is going to be a challenge for them to find quality hay at an affordable price,” Campbell said.
On the corn side, Campbell wasn’t able to go out and spray the corn with fertilizer when it became knee high because it has been too wet.
Now, he expects to lose about 85 acres of the corn crop that goes to feed livestock. The rest won’t be the best it could have been.
Soybeans seem to be withstanding the weather, but there are parts of Campbell’s about-500 soybean acres drowning.
“The water takes the oxygen out and they smother,” he said.
Wheat at the Campbell farm spreads across about 80 acres.
“The weather has been hard on the wheat because when it is wet it is really prone to disease,” Campbell said.
Farmers across Mahoning County and elsewhere were thrown off by the weather. May’s warm weather made planting time easy.
“We got everything planted in a timely manner and it looked good,” Campbell said.
Campbell, a sixth-generation farmer, has heard some stories of rough farming years from his late father, Dean, and older brother, Don, and he remembers some rough years.
“It’s all on mother nature,” Campbell said.
Second-generation farmer Carl Angiuli of Angiuli’s Farm in Canfield luckily has several of his crops on higher ground. The crops on low land are what took the hit.
“Some of the fields are drowned out,” he said. “There’s a lot of disease pressure and problems with insects and bugs more than usual.”
The 150 acres of the Angiuli produce farm bring sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, berries and other items to dinner tables across the Mahoning Valley.
The rain “will hit the business,” Angiuli said. “It will impact the amount of product you have.”
About 20,000 pepper plants will be lost this year out of the more than 100,000 plants the farm has.
“Nobody would have guessed it would have been this extreme,” he said. “Now, we are stuck in this pattern of wet.”