Weather Report

Don’t pray for the rain to stop. Pray for good luck fishing when the river floods. – Wendell Berry

The good news, for us, is that Rock Spring Farm truly dodged the bullet when it came to this week’s extreme rainfall events. The bad news is that many farmers in the community of local vegetable producers were devastatingly in the way of the storms that rolled through the area Saturday and Sunday, and which continue to threaten as I write this.

When I arrived home from deliveries early Friday evening, the ground was still saturated from two weeks of consistent rainfall. On Saturday morning, it began raining again. I took a small crew out to the field to pick up the very last of the onion crop before the weather really let loose at noon. It rained all night Saturday, including the sort of shake-the-house thunderstorm that non-native Midwesterners fear. The rains continued heavy on Sunday morning, and by Sunday afternoon we began to become aware of the devastation around us.

On our farm, we had about six inches of rain over the weekend, compared with reports of seventeen inches in Rushford, Minnesota, just 20 miles away. Two small fields that already sat partially under water were more so by the end of the weekend, and we experienced some pretty severe erosion due to the sheer amount of water moving over the landscape. We’ve lost about half of our fall storage carrots to flooding – they’ve been under water for over a week – and some of our turnips. Walking in the fields is almost impossible, and every footstep leaves a puddle behind as water flows from supersaturated soil into the empty pockets, so harvest, or any other field work, is much harder than it is under normal circumstances. We can’t drive any of our harvest vans to the fields, so everything has to be removed by hand or four-wheel drive tractor and wagon.

Area market farmers who serve Rochester and the Twin Cities had it much worse, some suffering complete crop loss and infrastructure damage, and erosion that makes our few gullies pale by comparison. We will continue to hold them in our hearts as they try to find a way forward.

Neighbors who have lived here all their lives say they have never seen weather quite like this. They’ve seen rainfall events with this much rain, but never without a drying spell. We’ve been three weeks with no significant drying, so every drop of rain just runs off the field. Springs have sprung up everywhere, and water flows that are usually occasional have been running for a full week. Three inches of rain on Tuesday night resulted in the worst flooding we have ever seen, with the seasonal flow that runs through the middle of the farm jumping its banks and running through the our transplant greenhouse – no damage done, but lots of mud left behind.

As farmers, water rules our world. A lack is a drought, too much is a flood. We are fortunate on this farm to have a mixture of ridge and valley fields, so that we can split our crops to accommodate multiple rainfall scenarios. We’ve laid out our fields with frequent grass strips, which helps us to mitigate the overland water flow that results in erosion. Also, being located at near the top of the Middle Bear Creek watershed means that even with a severe rainfall event, our fields are not as susceptible to flooding as those further downstream, where the water has had a chance to gather volume and speed.

Still, we will take this weather as a warning shot across the bow, and take even more steps now to mitigate potential future damage. On Tuesday, we had a visit from specialists from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS, a part of the USDA) to discuss field drainage and water diversion on the farm, and, after this weather, we certainly have a hefty incentive to follow up on that.