Severe drought punishing large portions of Ohio, including many area farms

“We were on pace for probably a bumper crop until the rain just shut off,” said Harbage, who tends to the family farm along with his son, Lane, the eighth generation of the family to do so in Clark County. “Last three months ... we’ve just completely dried up, and we’re definitely not going to have the crop that we thought.”

Harbage said this year’s drought is the worst that he has seen in his nearly 30 years in the profession and that, until this year, he has never had a crop die from a lack of rain.

“Our corn and soybeans have all died prematurely and our hay is short, so we’re not gonna have enough feed for our cattle,” he said.

Of Ohio’s 88 counties, 87 were highlighted as under drought conditions last week on the U.S. Drought Monitor map. A growing section of southern and Southeast Ohio now fall under the worst possible category on the drought scale, D-4, or Exceptional Drought. Those conditions can produce “exceptional and widespread crop and pasture losses, exceptional fire risk, shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells causing water emergencies,” according to the National Weather Service.

Large portions of southern and Southeast Ohio are now classified at D-3, or the Extreme Drought stage, which can produce “major crop/pasture losses; extreme fire danger; widespread water shortages or restrictions.”

In recent weeks, all of Greene and Clark counties and the majority of Miami, Montgomery and Warren counties slipped into the D-2 or the Severe Drought category, which means crop or pasture losses are likely, fire risk is very high, water shortages are common and water restrictions are more likely to be imposed.

The USDA Farm Service Agency has designated 22 counties in southern and Southwest Ohio as natural disaster areas. Another 16 contiguous counties are eligible for emergency loan assistance through the agency.

“We’re talking about weeks — six, eight, 10 weeks — of no rain,” Ohio Farm Bureau spokesman Ty Higgins told this news outlet. “I’ve talked to farmers who haven’t seen precipitation since the middle of June, early part of July, so we’re talking about a long, sustained period with hot and dry weather that farmers really haven’t seen in a generation or two.”

More than 20% of the state is seeing exceptional drought, and more than 60% is seeing severe or extreme drought, numbers that Higgins said will keep growing.

“There’s no doubt that we’re going to see the area of drought in Ohio expand because we have not seen the adequate rainfall in order to give us some relief from what we’ve been seeing over this very hot and dry summer,” he said.

Corn and soybeans are two of the primary crops that farmer Craig Corry grows on his 500-acre property in Greene County, but lack of rain, especially during last month and this month, has ravaged those crops.

“We’ll be glad to harvest what we have and do the best we can with marketing net crop, if some of it has not already been contract priced,” Corry said. “But the commodity prices that we’re looking at now on the Board of Trade in Chicago, local grain markets, the market nationally is predicting ... large supplies of corn and soybeans at the national level. Unfortunately, here in Ohio, we may be dealing with the combination of not only lower yields, but lower commodity prices.”

Gail Lierer, 66, who has lived on a farm all her life and farmed alongside her husband for the past 47 years, said that despite less precipitation than usual this season, her property in southwest Butler County’s Morgan Twp. has gotten “some timely rains.”

“I don’t think (the drought has ) really hurt our yields a lot, but we won’t know until the combine runs,” she said.

Lierer, a former Butler County Farm Bureau president, said the farm of her daughter’s neighbor in Ross County, a southern Ohio county hard hit by the drought, experienced a massive fire in a cornfield last Tuesday.

“They lost about 30 acres, so don’t throw a match or a cigarette out because it’s going to catch fire,” she said.

Ashley Novak, a meteorologist at the NWS office in Wilmington, said communities like Dayton and Hamilton typically receive about a little more than an inch of rain by just before mid-September and around 3 inches by month’s end. This year, however, those areas have only received trace amounts of precipitation with most locations in the Miami Valley seeing less than a quarter-inch of rain for the month.

The forecast for the region this week showed higher-than-average temperatures and only a slight chance at rain this Wednesday, Novak said. A 3- to 4-week forecast on Thursday didn’t offer much in the way of drought relief, Novak said.

“It’s also showing signals for below normal in terms of precipitation ... so not really a good signal for precipitation in the extended outlook either, unfortunately,” she said.

Even if this month manages to include some surprise rainfall, it won’t be enough at this point to help, Higgins said.

“To put it in perspective, some of these counties have a deficit of six, eight, 10 inches of rain that they normally would have this time of year for the summer,” he said. “If we get a quarter of an inch or a half an inch here and there, obviously it’s welcomed. It’s going to help some, but it’s certainly not going to completely alleviate the situation.”

Higgins said that due to the drought, Ohio farmers are harvesting corn and soybeans right now, well more than a month ahead of schedule.

“The crops have died prematurely, and what we’re seeing from those fields are 50% or more less production than 2023, so that impacts the farmers’ bottom line, but ... the consumer could see the impact of this on their bottom line as well when it comes to what they’re seeing on those grocery store shelves,” he said. “Not right away, but in the months to come, we could see elevated costs because of lower production levels here in Ohio and across a good part of our region.”

Agriculture is Ohio’s number one industry, so if farmers are challenged, the economy is going to be challenged, Higgins said.

Brian Harbage said with a drought of this magnitude, there’s no way for farms to bounce back and salvage the growing season.

“I think you just write this year off,” he said. “We already know crop prices are in the tank (and) probably we’re not going to see the yields we were hoping for. There might be some sort of crop insurance payment. I don’t know that yet. There might be some disaster assistance with the government on our hay and cattle, so, yeah, you just take what you can get and live to farm another year.”

Lane Harbage, 22, a recent college graduate who has been helping his family farm since he was 10 years old and farming land of his own since 15, said the past six weeks or so has been the most noticeable absence of adequate rainfall.

Typically, by mid-September, the Harbage family farm will be filled with soybeans that are still lush, green, big and bushy and starting to fill out their pods, he said.

“Right now, (during this drought), anything that was planted before May 15 is burnt up,” Harbage said. “Pods are not filling out. All the soybeans are really small, and ... the pods are starting to crack because they’re so dry and the beans are, they’re just little, tiny BBs.“

With corn, “instead of luscious green fields, we’re facing large, brown fields,” he said.

A shortage of hay this year means that the farm will be running out of it before it can make more for next year, Harbage said.

“You have to look to either buy expensive hay or look for an alternative, and there really is no alternative,” Harbage said. “You could start feeding silage, but ... if all the corn is burnt up, there wasn’t as much silage being chopped this year.”

Corry, of Greene County, said the worst time to have a drought of this magnitude would be April, May or June, during the early season crop development. Although southwest Ohio is experiencing severe drought conditions now, spring saw “some timely and adequate rains to get the crop off to a good start.”

“Most of the fields in the Miami Valley will have a crop to harvest,” Corry said. “Now the late-season development grain fill in the ears of corn, the size of the kernel is is dependent on moisture. The number of beans and the size of beans and a soybean pod are going to be affected negatively by this dry weather, but we will not have a total loss.”