A reader sent me this article entitled What Produce Drought Isn't Killing, People Are Stealing: Killing Drought in Arkansas
By Ron Klinefelter, owner of Spring Valley Organic Growers, 10 August 2011:
This is now our 77th consecutive day (Aug. 7) of this heat and drought. Temperatures all week were over 100. One day it was 104, one it was 107! We also broke 2 new all time heat records this week….108, and 112, and of course, no rain.
Several more things bit the dust this week. One, a patch of a beautiful heirloom grinding corn, that usually produces 2 ears, many a foot long. Even with every other day watering, they just couldn’t produce even one ear, and are now just curling up and dying.
Attention…..NO SEED for next year!
I was walking in one of the gardens yesterday, and the big elderberry bushes have so dried up that their big dinner plate sized clusters of fruit, which have just sat there green for weeks, instead of ripening, have begun to mummify, like they had been placed in a dehydrator. Also, the armadillo damage is so great now that they are ravaging whole beds. In the morning, it looks like a roto-tiller has gone thru there.
I have natural food stores calling me, asking for any produce, especially tomatoes. When I was in one of them last week, they were selling organic tomatoes FROM MEXICO! In talking to the manager/produce buyer of Prairie Markets last week, she told me that virtually everyone had “given up”, and there wasn’t even a viable farmers market in town now.
One more little problem. I was talking to someone in an adjoining county that was fortunate to get SOME rain. They had a pretty good bunch of tomatoes that they had been letting ripen on the vine. They were going to pick them one evening, but it was just too miserably hot. They decided to wait until morning to pick them for canning, when it was a little “cooler”. This is a relative term, as it is well after dark.9:00p.m., and it’s still 92 degrees. When they went out to pick them the next morning, someone(s) had snuck in, in the night and stolen EVERY SINGLE TOMATO! Not a one was left!
I have so much water and time invested in the gardens now, that I don’t hardly dare to stop now, but even if it were to start raining for days now, there probably wouldn’t be time enough before frost to bring another crop off. This will most likely be my last year of commercial growing. I am a vanishing species.
Seeing what I see, and reading what I’m reading from all around the country (and world), I find it almost impossible to believe that food shortages and possibly famine are not dead ahead. One would be a fool to not be putting up food like crazy, while you can get it. To NOT be doing that, I believe, is a very dangerous and foolhardy move – act now!
Read it yourself here: Produce Killing Drought
