After spending much of the spring waiting for rain, area farmers are finding they are waiting once again – this time to harvest.
Large amounts of rainfall late in the spring, combined with unseasonably cold temperatures had made it difficult for farmers to plant, and now they have customers looking for produce that is either still growing or not coming up at all.
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“My biggest fear was that we would get too much rain when I was supposed to be planting and that’s what happened,” said Colo Walker, owner of Walker Roadside Stand in Little Compton. “When it’s raining I can’t work the soil. Then in June it was cold. Right now we are about seven to 10 days behind. Some crops didn’t even come up.”
“We are running a good 10 to 12 days late on everything and that’s 10 days that we aren’t going to be able to make up,” said Vinny Confreda, owner of Confreda Farms in Warwick. “It’s been a very tough spring. We couldn’t get into a lot of our land to plant. We had to jump around a lot and that is going to make it more expensive to harvest.”
According to Al Bettencourt, executive director of the Rhode Island Farm Bureau and owner of his own Tiverton farm, late planting has a direct impact on a farmer’s bottom line.
“Early corn brings a higher price,” he said. “Usually that is true with all crops; the earlier crops bring in more money than later crops. So this is definitely going to hurt.”
For some farmers, what isn’t coming in late, isn’t coming up at all.
Rep. Susan Sosnowski, who runs Sosnowski Farm in West Kingston, lost her entire strawberry crop in late spring after a string of unseasonably cold nights.
“Strawberries are usually a strong beginning for us,” she said. “We don’t usually have a problem with strawberries, but this year they got wiped out. We had to disappoint a lot of people. That’s tough.”
Tough, Sosnowski said, because like many farmers in Rhode Island she sells directly to the consumers through a roadside stand and by setting up at various farmers’ markets. Her fear is that when customers realize she doesn’t have the products she usually does, they will begin shopping at the larger supermarket chains.
“It’s difficult when you have these big supermarket chains that have everything all year round,” she said. “Now with things being late, and some things not even coming out it’s going to be a real risk.”
Confreda understands Sosnowski’s worry. Harvesting from 13 fields across the state to sell at his farm stand in Warwick, he estimates that his sales have suffered at least 15 percent as a result of recent weather patterns.
“We had to jump around, but we managed to get all the planting in,” he said. “We lost about 30 acres of crop in two different locations. But we are dealing with Mother Nature and there is nothing we can do.”
Bettencourt agreed.
“Farmers are gamblers when it comes to the weather,” he said.
But some like Sosnowski diversify to increase their odds – growing everything from turf, to hay, to vegetables.
“Years ago you had farmers that would grow 50 acres of the same thing,” she said. “You don’t see that today. We have a little bit of everything so that if one thing fails we have something else to fall back on. I never wanted to put all my eggs in one basket.”
Ken Ayars, chief of the Division of Agriculture at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, is optimistic that the rest of the harvest season will be good for local farmers.
“Last fall and winter were dry, and then we had a rainy, cold snap,” he said. “The rain and cold have slowed things down, but the past few weeks have been good ones for the farmers, and that’s the type of weather that they need to get seeds.”
