Drought killing corn crop early this year, affecting livestock

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The drought is leaving its withering mark all across the state.

As the cost of corn rises, farmers planted more than in recent years, but the gamble is blowing up on some, with a drought not only drying up their crop, but emptying their pockets too.

“Those are the guys that are really, really going to take a whooping — and anybody who doesn’t have irrigation,” said Les Dietz, packing supervisor at Baugher’s Farm in Westminster.

Dietz works with an extensive irrigation system that is raising costs about 15 percent this month, but it’s been the only way his crops have been saved, he said.

“Nobody in this industry wants to see weather like we’re having right now; it’s pitiful, the cornfields,” he said.

Farmers in Maryland expect a drought ever year, but it usually doesn’t come so early.

“This drought is probably like any August drought, but the problem is, it’s only July,” Dietz said.

And the crushing effect on corn creates other problems as well, because livestock that eat corn have a limited food supply.

They can’t turn to hay either, because it’s too dry to eat.

“It’s just going to increase my cost tremendously,” said Dawn Bero, an organic farmer in Street.

It’s her first year trying to grow her own hay, so her hopes of making more money than in past years is shrinking by the day.

“There’s nothing I can really do to make the grass grow,” she said. “Do the rain dance.”

She said if this drought continues through the summer, she’ll lose 30 percent of profits.

Of the three or four hay harvests a season, most have lost their second, Harford County Agricultural Coordinator John Sullivan said.

“A lot of farmers put in extra this year, and now there’s a wait-and-see attitude,” Sullivan said. “We’re hoping it doesn’t dry out all summer.”

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com

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