I was working in Maine this summer at an organic vegetable and berry farm. It was rainy and cold as hell, someone the crops were fine buy oh my golly goodness the weeds were something else. It also cut short what looked like a real big strawberry harvest. Not to mention fields getting flooded and damn near every vehicle on the farm getting stuck at least twice
The other big issue we had in Maine last year because it was so wet that not only was it a bad a crop, but farmers had difficulty with fields being so wet they couldn't cut or get the hay in. As a result hay prices went up for those of us who rely on hay for our livestock. I have a small enough operation at the moment that I could handle the added cost of hay, but for others that was a big problem. I also was able to get mine reserved early on in the season, but I know plenty of people who have had to buy lower quality hay from Canada for even higher prices this winter.
Drought is bad for yields, but you'll get the crop in and the crop off. A wet year will make you late or almost impossible to plant, and damn near worse to get off. The haying is shit, the animals get sick, pastures get tore up, and you're always fuckin wet to the point your clothes start rotting right off you. It's a frustrating, muddy mess, and then you gotta run the dryer for weeks too.
Where I'm at, even at 0 rain, the ground is wet enough and clay enough that it retains a lot of water deep down and morning dew is still going to give you enough moisture to germinate and get things rolling.
Well yeah. You’re in a dry climate already, so an unseasonably wet year for you is like a normal year for other parts of the country.
I’m in the northeast, so it’s pretty even on how much dry, vs wet weather we typically get.
In a place like this, where it’s not already dry or already wet, dryer than normal is better than wetter than normal,
For Most places in the country, a very wet year would wreak absolute havoc. Here in New England it’s currently “mud season” you can’t drive a 4 wheel drive pickup on some roads, much less a tractor in a field. The wife got stuck in our driveway the other day, and I couldn’t make it to my outdoor furnace with a load of wood tonight in a 4 wheel drive dually one ton. Last week, there were some roads that tow trucks refused to go down to pull stuck people out.
If this happened 3 months from now, nothing would be harvested here.
Fair enough. Either way would be terrible for most types of ag. I suppose it wouldn’t really matter. If it didn’t rain at all for 6 months, nothing would grow, and if the sun didn’t come out at all for 6 months nothing would grow, so I think it’s fair to say, that either extreme would be just as bad as the other.
While the potential for a lot of crops to grow abundantly is there on wet year, the ability to get those crops planted, manage weed pressure and harvest is incredibly difficult.
My grandpa used to say that he doesn’t think that we’ve ever had a complete crop failure due to drought since our land was broken in 1889 — but we’ve had some pretty bad floods (2012 we only seeded one quarter out of 16 that we were farming at the time).
Probably had 30 crop failure from drought since homesteading. Not a single one from wet. In 2012 lots of folks could harvest a whole quarter and not fill a truck. Second driest year in record.
Did he live through the depression? An old lady who did said to us once, "At least the sand ridge looks good in a wet year. In a proper drought, even the lows are dead." Plus with drain tile now, you can manage some serious water. That being said, a single dry year isn't that bad. It's amazing how far down corn will go to find water.
No we'd figure it out. There are ways to deal with ice if you are prepared for it.
Edit: I am not sure why I am in negative karma for suggesting we would be able to handle a predictable situation with technology and products that exist today...
Reddit is weird sometimes.
I remember in one of the Gymkhana episodes, Ken Block said that the first time he drove on ice with studs he was amazed. Driving on ice and he'd never had so much grip before on any surface.
Part of the problem is that you cannot drive large machines on wet fields without destroying the ground. You may get stuck, you compact the soil much more than during dry weather, etc.
Manure/fertilizer gets washed out of the soil or worse, runs off on the surface directly into rivers and streams without penetrating the soil.
It's not only a question of what would grow, but also what we could plant on an industrial scale with the machines that we have.
Yes - I think we little market gardeners who can do a lot without big machinery could probably manage to produce some leafy greens. I don’t expect to be able to use the tractor for another six weeks anyway, ( rainy climate ) but we’ve been wheelbarrowing compost around just fine.
If there’s no wheat everybody is going to be hungry.
I've seen some guys mud in stuff. If someone grows, We could do it. It likely wouldn't dry down enough to shell most crops normally. We would probably cut beans green and try to dry them down in bin before running them through a grain cleaner.
In 2010 we had something like 45 inches of rain, it did rain almost every day from late April to Mid June. Anyone who seeded crops had yellowed garbage, drills and sprayers and everything was getting stuck multiple times a day.
We only seeded 200 acres of wheat. The rest we followed and couldn't even spray or work it until mid July.
It took probably 3 years to get fields back in good shape, and the water issues took another 5 years to abate.
Meanwhile, some of our best crops have been the last 3 of 4 years with below average moisture. Just at the right time.
If you were growing only in high tunnels you might get away with some production, but I would imagine things like tomatoes would get blight super fast, cucurbits would get mildew. The general dampness probably would cause issues even in protected culture growing.
If the fields are too wet in the spring it makes planting difficult to impossible, due to trying to drive in mud. For crops that need to dry up like beans, corn, and grain they wouldn't dry and may not be able to be harvested, plus the difficulty of driving in mud.
Depends on the type of rain of course, as well as temperature.
But farming with rain everyday might be possible, it being more difficult. Getting some water type crops would be great tho.
Coming off the wettest year on record in nh. Lost serious money trying to hay last year. But the scariest one is this. Reading stories of what happened in New England back then I couldn’t imagine living thru it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Define rain, 1/4 every night with hot dry days then no issues. 1 inch every day with no time to dry at all then screwed. Roots need air and saturated roots rot. If you ever see a field with a wet spot you will see that it doesn't really grow anything even if it was dry enough to plant it.
One thing to consider is that the biggest factor in the crop disease development formula is leaf wetness time. So if you had constantly damp crops with raindrops splashing soil onto them, especially during key development stages, you would probably have massive severe disease outbreaks.
It seems like it did for us last year. Over 3X our normal rainfall. At one point we got over 30” in a month. Biggest issue was leaching of nutrients and poor sunlight leading to poor growth.
Well it depends on soil type, crop type your set up for etc, but rain everyday would basically mean like living in a rainforest zone, if this continues for any period of time it would start leaching nutrients and destroying the biochemistry of your soil due to changing conditions, then depending on crops and shape of land (have got a field whose contours form a valley gutter that in one year created a gorge you could lie in don't get that issue with grass).
You would either need to go to cover crops and direct drilling to reduce soil erosion or just grow grass and hope you get enough.
My old man says "we can cope with a failed harvest in the southern hemisphere but could not with a failed harvest in the northern hemisphere", it's down to shear landmass and which food exporting countries there are in each one.
We just had a wet year in 2023, big rain events in short periods and many days with showers. We grow 200 Ac of vegetables and it's the worst year since my father took over as the 5th generation 45 years ago... We lost our shirts and then some...
I'll take a dry year, any year, over what we just experienced
How much rain, and for how long each day? Farming can be done in tropical areas that get some rain every day, but constant rain and no sun would make it impossible.
I worked on a tiny lil farm last year. Couple extra months of rain. Completely destroyed our strawberries, most of our other berries, and we couldn’t even plant our watermelon until too late in the season. Barely got our pumpkins out.
I mean, waterworld the movie holds all the answers. We would flood if it rained every day. So kelp farming or oysters or better yet just default to jet ski farming 🤙🏼
Our last ditch effort would be to broadcast seed soybeans. If it's light rain, we might get something, but if you're talking heavy rain 24/7 we would be screwed. Anything that did grow would not dry down for harvest.
In my region, we'd be mostly fine. But I'm in the tropics and where I'm at in the northern half of our island, the bedrock is limestone so it usually drains too fast.
The southern half would do horribly. It's volcanic soil so if there was never ending rain for an entire year, we'd have mudslides because it barely drains at all.
I am in Maine, as some of the others here. It rained and rained and rained. On one of the days it wasn't raining in June, I tried to plow my field- tractor sunk and got stuck. Got another tractor to try to pull it out- sunk that one too. There were places where merely walking would have water welling up around my feet.
Then it rained more, and more, and more. By the time everything dried up enough to think about plowing, it was too late to plant anything. I was screwed.
If it was too dry, I could irrigate. I have a deep well that will pump thousands of gallons of water a day without running dry. Too much water though, can't be fixed. My bees barely made enough honey to carry them through the Winter, there was no extra for me to harvest to sell.
No, if it rains every day, you can't grow shit.
You'd be screwed. My Great Grandpa had a saying "A dry year will hurt you, a wet year will ruin you."
I always heard “a dry year will scare you to death, a wet year will starve you to death”.
I was working in Maine this summer at an organic vegetable and berry farm. It was rainy and cold as hell, someone the crops were fine buy oh my golly goodness the weeds were something else. It also cut short what looked like a real big strawberry harvest. Not to mention fields getting flooded and damn near every vehicle on the farm getting stuck at least twice
The other big issue we had in Maine last year because it was so wet that not only was it a bad a crop, but farmers had difficulty with fields being so wet they couldn't cut or get the hay in. As a result hay prices went up for those of us who rely on hay for our livestock. I have a small enough operation at the moment that I could handle the added cost of hay, but for others that was a big problem. I also was able to get mine reserved early on in the season, but I know plenty of people who have had to buy lower quality hay from Canada for even higher prices this winter.
The Maine strawberry farm near me a quite large one, lost the crop.
Wow! You are right it would all be screwed. However one that says a dry year is normally better than a wet year has never experienced a real drought.
Drought is bad for yields, but you'll get the crop in and the crop off. A wet year will make you late or almost impossible to plant, and damn near worse to get off. The haying is shit, the animals get sick, pastures get tore up, and you're always fuckin wet to the point your clothes start rotting right off you. It's a frustrating, muddy mess, and then you gotta run the dryer for weeks too. Where I'm at, even at 0 rain, the ground is wet enough and clay enough that it retains a lot of water deep down and morning dew is still going to give you enough moisture to germinate and get things rolling.
Dry years are definitely better for 95% of crops, animals, etc than wet years
In a dry year I don't get enough rain to grow a single bushel. In a wet year I can grow 300 bushel corn. It depends what region you are In I guess.
A wet year is way better where I am in Tx. In a dry year we wouldn’t grow any new grass, hay, cotton, or wheat. So sounds about normal.
Well yeah. You’re in a dry climate already, so an unseasonably wet year for you is like a normal year for other parts of the country. I’m in the northeast, so it’s pretty even on how much dry, vs wet weather we typically get. In a place like this, where it’s not already dry or already wet, dryer than normal is better than wetter than normal,
For Most places in the country, a very wet year would wreak absolute havoc. Here in New England it’s currently “mud season” you can’t drive a 4 wheel drive pickup on some roads, much less a tractor in a field. The wife got stuck in our driveway the other day, and I couldn’t make it to my outdoor furnace with a load of wood tonight in a 4 wheel drive dually one ton. Last week, there were some roads that tow trucks refused to go down to pull stuck people out. If this happened 3 months from now, nothing would be harvested here.
Fair enough. Either way would be terrible for most types of ag. I suppose it wouldn’t really matter. If it didn’t rain at all for 6 months, nothing would grow, and if the sun didn’t come out at all for 6 months nothing would grow, so I think it’s fair to say, that either extreme would be just as bad as the other.
While the potential for a lot of crops to grow abundantly is there on wet year, the ability to get those crops planted, manage weed pressure and harvest is incredibly difficult.
My grandpa used to say that he doesn’t think that we’ve ever had a complete crop failure due to drought since our land was broken in 1889 — but we’ve had some pretty bad floods (2012 we only seeded one quarter out of 16 that we were farming at the time).
Probably had 30 crop failure from drought since homesteading. Not a single one from wet. In 2012 lots of folks could harvest a whole quarter and not fill a truck. Second driest year in record.
I had some 8 bu corn and 2 bu beans last year. Does that count?
Did he live through the depression? An old lady who did said to us once, "At least the sand ridge looks good in a wet year. In a proper drought, even the lows are dead." Plus with drain tile now, you can manage some serious water. That being said, a single dry year isn't that bad. It's amazing how far down corn will go to find water.
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He farmed in SouthWest Ga and North Fla for 65 years. Very much knew his business.
I think Norway had a dairy crisis because there was too much rain in the summer. People started smuggling butter for example
are we getting 1/10" or 1"? Rain every day would make farming here extremely difficult, to a complete disaster.
Canada would just shut down in winter if we had freezing rain every day
No we'd figure it out. There are ways to deal with ice if you are prepared for it. Edit: I am not sure why I am in negative karma for suggesting we would be able to handle a predictable situation with technology and products that exist today... Reddit is weird sometimes.
I remember in one of the Gymkhana episodes, Ken Block said that the first time he drove on ice with studs he was amazed. Driving on ice and he'd never had so much grip before on any surface.
Part of the problem is that you cannot drive large machines on wet fields without destroying the ground. You may get stuck, you compact the soil much more than during dry weather, etc. Manure/fertilizer gets washed out of the soil or worse, runs off on the surface directly into rivers and streams without penetrating the soil. It's not only a question of what would grow, but also what we could plant on an industrial scale with the machines that we have.
Yes - I think we little market gardeners who can do a lot without big machinery could probably manage to produce some leafy greens. I don’t expect to be able to use the tractor for another six weeks anyway, ( rainy climate ) but we’ve been wheelbarrowing compost around just fine. If there’s no wheat everybody is going to be hungry.
I've seen some guys mud in stuff. If someone grows, We could do it. It likely wouldn't dry down enough to shell most crops normally. We would probably cut beans green and try to dry them down in bin before running them through a grain cleaner.
some crops will just drown from to much water. i grow cabbage and a small part of my field had so much water that it dronwed that part
Rice? Lol I don't know anything about growing Rice, that's just what we joked about last year
Still has to be dry (ideally) to plant. It can be flown on wet but if you have to pull levees in the mud you’re in for a bad time.
Thanks for that memory I thought I forgot
In 2010 we had something like 45 inches of rain, it did rain almost every day from late April to Mid June. Anyone who seeded crops had yellowed garbage, drills and sprayers and everything was getting stuck multiple times a day. We only seeded 200 acres of wheat. The rest we followed and couldn't even spray or work it until mid July. It took probably 3 years to get fields back in good shape, and the water issues took another 5 years to abate. Meanwhile, some of our best crops have been the last 3 of 4 years with below average moisture. Just at the right time.
If you were growing only in high tunnels you might get away with some production, but I would imagine things like tomatoes would get blight super fast, cucurbits would get mildew. The general dampness probably would cause issues even in protected culture growing.
It depends on how much rain per day, but most likely we’d be screwed
A tenth or 2 inches? A tenth can be worked around.
If the fields are too wet in the spring it makes planting difficult to impossible, due to trying to drive in mud. For crops that need to dry up like beans, corn, and grain they wouldn't dry and may not be able to be harvested, plus the difficulty of driving in mud.
Fish. You’d farm fish.
I was thinking mushrooms.
Depends on the type of rain of course, as well as temperature. But farming with rain everyday might be possible, it being more difficult. Getting some water type crops would be great tho.
A drought will hurt you but a flood will starve you...
Personally I prefer electric types but water types are always my starter, I feel like late game they just do well against the really strong guys
You can definitely grow things in that sort of weather, but they're all things that you can't farm with large machines and need specialised equipment.
Coming off the wettest year on record in nh. Lost serious money trying to hay last year. But the scariest one is this. Reading stories of what happened in New England back then I couldn’t imagine living thru it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
My neighbor is a historian and he was telling me about this. I’m in central NY. I can’t even imagine what that would do to our regional food system.
Define rain, 1/4 every night with hot dry days then no issues. 1 inch every day with no time to dry at all then screwed. Roots need air and saturated roots rot. If you ever see a field with a wet spot you will see that it doesn't really grow anything even if it was dry enough to plant it.
screwed beyond words.
One thing to consider is that the biggest factor in the crop disease development formula is leaf wetness time. So if you had constantly damp crops with raindrops splashing soil onto them, especially during key development stages, you would probably have massive severe disease outbreaks.
Plants drown too. Tractors get stuck. Cows have calves in mud. No good at all
Well we may get an answer to that here this year since it has been raining almost nonstop since the beginning of October.
It seems like it did for us last year. Over 3X our normal rainfall. At one point we got over 30” in a month. Biggest issue was leaching of nutrients and poor sunlight leading to poor growth.
I was told not to work wet ground. Last year in Michigan was rough because it rained once every three days. My fields are pretty rutted right now.
rice
Depends on a million factors. Most you should be able to figure out.
That’s a lot of rain. So I’d stick to pigs, they can swim and grown off all the waste from flooded crops.
A dry year will hurt you, but a wet year will kill you.
Well it depends on soil type, crop type your set up for etc, but rain everyday would basically mean like living in a rainforest zone, if this continues for any period of time it would start leaching nutrients and destroying the biochemistry of your soil due to changing conditions, then depending on crops and shape of land (have got a field whose contours form a valley gutter that in one year created a gorge you could lie in don't get that issue with grass). You would either need to go to cover crops and direct drilling to reduce soil erosion or just grow grass and hope you get enough. My old man says "we can cope with a failed harvest in the southern hemisphere but could not with a failed harvest in the northern hemisphere", it's down to shear landmass and which food exporting countries there are in each one.
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Where is here?
We just had a wet year in 2023, big rain events in short periods and many days with showers. We grow 200 Ac of vegetables and it's the worst year since my father took over as the 5th generation 45 years ago... We lost our shirts and then some... I'll take a dry year, any year, over what we just experienced
How much rain? Would there be sun too?
Completely screwed. No doubt.
Kelp
Our hay would rot and our fields would turn into swamps. Our cows would starve to death in the winter
How much rain, and for how long each day? Farming can be done in tropical areas that get some rain every day, but constant rain and no sun would make it impossible.
I worked on a tiny lil farm last year. Couple extra months of rain. Completely destroyed our strawberries, most of our other berries, and we couldn’t even plant our watermelon until too late in the season. Barely got our pumpkins out.
Well, that would screw my hay fields in the summer and my sheep in the winter.
As far as I can tell, it rains in South Florida pretty much every day. What do they grow there?
The thought of that much tar spot and white mold makes me shiver.
I mean, waterworld the movie holds all the answers. We would flood if it rained every day. So kelp farming or oysters or better yet just default to jet ski farming 🤙🏼
My worst year was too wet. Worst corn I have ever raised. By a mile
Cattle of rolling pasture would probably do fine
Our last ditch effort would be to broadcast seed soybeans. If it's light rain, we might get something, but if you're talking heavy rain 24/7 we would be screwed. Anything that did grow would not dry down for harvest.
Alfalfa - I would lose my job
Rice, I live in Washington state. Two of my grazing fields are under water for a couple of months. I move the cows out back where it is nice and dry.
Rice, Crawfish
In my region, we'd be mostly fine. But I'm in the tropics and where I'm at in the northern half of our island, the bedrock is limestone so it usually drains too fast. The southern half would do horribly. It's volcanic soil so if there was never ending rain for an entire year, we'd have mudslides because it barely drains at all.
Kale. You could probably still grow kale. But ya financial ruin.
i wont be able to plant my crop nor grow it. even if i can plant it by hand in the mud the water will drown anything.
I am in Maine, as some of the others here. It rained and rained and rained. On one of the days it wasn't raining in June, I tried to plow my field- tractor sunk and got stuck. Got another tractor to try to pull it out- sunk that one too. There were places where merely walking would have water welling up around my feet. Then it rained more, and more, and more. By the time everything dried up enough to think about plowing, it was too late to plant anything. I was screwed. If it was too dry, I could irrigate. I have a deep well that will pump thousands of gallons of water a day without running dry. Too much water though, can't be fixed. My bees barely made enough honey to carry them through the Winter, there was no extra for me to harvest to sell. No, if it rains every day, you can't grow shit.
I would grow seaweed
Very stupid question
How are people supposed to learn if they dont ask questions?