Paula and Tom Harman have been growing fruits and vegetables on their Churchville farm for sale at their roadside Harman's Farm Market stand for 28 years, but this season, with its extended gray and rainy weather, has been unusually difficult.
"It has been the most challenging start to a season," Paula Harman said Wednesday. "It's not just the rain, it has been the cold weather."
The rain and the chillier-than-normal temperatures have affected the Harmans and other farmers throughout Harford County, with planting times for some major crops, such as corn for livestock, pushed back, along with delays in the growth of crops already planted, plus delays for spreading manure and fertilizer.
"Everybody's behind; it's frustrating because you can't get a good string of days together," Zach Rose, a White Hall grain farmer, said.
Rain, whether as a steady shower or a light drizzle, has been falling in the Mid-Atlantic region nearly each day since the last week of April.
"It's one of the longest, what you would call rainy periods, on record," Dan Hofmann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Sterling, Va., forecast office, said.
"The reason for it is, we've had a frontal system that's been stalled over the region, and you get areas of low pressure that move along that," Hofmann continued.
Hofmann said the frontal system has stalled over the Mid-Atlantic states because the jet stream air current in the middle and upper atmosphere has been in "what we call a very blocky pattern."
"Everything is stuck right now, basically," Hofmann said. "Nothing behind it can get around it very quickly."
Sunny and warm weather has been stuck behind the rainy weather.
"[A plant] needs some heat and good dry weather to make it grow and make it flourish," Rose said.
Rose is a third-generation farmer whose family maintains 8,000 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, barley and hay in Harford County, Baltimore County, Frederick County and Adams and York counties in Pennsylvania.
He said rain has been a problem everywhere that his family, which operates the White Hall-based Clear Meadow Farm, raises crops.
"We're just fighting it everywhere we go," he said.
Cold hurts fruit crops
The rain and cooler-than-normal temperatures have made it difficult for farmers throughout Harford County to get in their fields, or delayed the process of seed gemination, according to Tricia Hoopes, a nutrient management advisor for the University of Maryland Extension-Harford County.
"The crops will grow quickly if it warms up and dries out a little bit," Hoopes said.
Produce growers were also hurt by a late frost that hit in early April after warmer-than-usual temperatures in March, and affected blooming apples, cherries, peaches and strawberries.
"Sometimes the later varieties come along better, but you lose the earlier varieties," Hoopes said.
Harman said her husband has completed six plantings of sweet corn, but "the cold has held it back from growing."
They have placed row covers on their vegetable crops to keep them warm.
"When it's so cold, you don't get root development," Harman said.
She said about 70 percent of the early strawberry crop was lost to the April cold, but the later varieties are doing well – workers started picking the berries Monday, and U-pick should start in a week to a week and a half, depending on how fast they ripen.
"We do have a beautiful crop of strawberries," Harman said.
The average temperature for the first half of May, measured at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, has been 56.1 degrees. The typical average temperature for this time of year is 61 degrees, Hofmann said.
Planting rain delays
The average rainfall for the month has been 3.86 inches, as of Tuesday, compared to a typical average of 2.24 inches, according to Hofmann.
Rose said his crew is normally finished planting by mid-to-late May, but a third of this year's corn crop and about half of the soybean crop still needs to be planted because of rain delays.
He said about a week of clear weather at a time is necessary for planting.
"We get two or three days here and two or three days there, and that makes it hard to get anything done," Rose said.
Farmers have been planting at night to make up for lost time, he said.
Corn future prices for July were at $3.89 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade as of Thursday afternoon, and they are at an average of $3.91 for September at the beginning of harvest season.
Corn futures are projected to be an average of $3.96 per bushel by December, when the harvest ends.
Rose said farmers could "break even" with a $4 per-bushel corn price. He noted corn prices were up to $8 four years ago, which is too expensive, especially for livestock farmers who buy animal feed made from corn or hay.
He said a "happy medium" would be $5 to $6.
"In order to have sustainable agriculture, you want your dairy producers and your cattle producers to make money as well as your grain producers – everybody can make a living," he said.
Soybean futures stood Thursday at $10.67 per bushel for July, $10.56 for September and $10.47 for November.
Wheat futures stood at $4.67 per bushel for July, $4.77 for September and $4.95 for December.
Rose said hay is growing well "because it likes the rain," but the wet weather means there is not enough time to get out and cut it, and it will lose value the longer it sits in the field. Hay that became moldy had to be dumped in the woods.
Wheat and barley are also susceptible to disease in wet weather, Rose said.
Hofmann, of the National Weather Service, noted the recent wet weather has been preceded by about six to seven weeks of dry weather in March and April. May's rain has helped cut the earlier rainfall deficit.
"The fact that it's all been falling persistently and fell in a relatively short time window, we definitely cut away the deficit we had going into this rainy period," Hofmann said.