The Oglethorpe Echo
Ben Brubaker, a row crop farmer on Comer Road, said this summer’s prolonged heat and drought have substantially impacted his day-to-day operations.
“We’ve been having to run irrigation pretty much around the clock to just try to stay ahead of the heat and lack of rain,” he said. “What’s called (our) dry land, basically the land that doesn’t have irrigation, has just been withering up to nothing, essentially.”
Oglethorpe County can count the number of days it rained in June on one hand, making it an unusually dry month.
Some areas of the county received about an inch of rain on Thursday and Saturday, but other areas haven’t received rain in over five weeks. The U.S. Drought Monitor rated Oglethorpe County at an intensity of D0, or abnormally dry.
The high temperature for the Athens area was 91 degrees in June 2023, according to the National Weather Service. The high temperature in the Athens area reached 101 degrees on June 26 this year.
“Temperatures in parts of Atlanta and North Georgia may get near 100 degrees,” said Marshall Shepherd, the director of the Atmospheric Science Program at the University of Georgia. “That would be sort of the first time since 2019 the Atlanta area has had an official 100-degree temperature, but it’s sort of indicative of something that the scientific studies are showing, which is that our heat waves are becoming more frequent and becoming more intense.”
County extension coordinator Shanna Reynolds said Oglethorpe County has few farming operations that have large-scale irrigation systems. Most row crops, hayfields and pastures rely on rain as their water source.
“It’s very dry. Our farmers are praying for rain as there aren’t really any crops that can get by without water,” Reynolds said in an email to The Echo. “It’s our most essential resource and it’s been weeks since some farms in the county have had a drop. We have very few farming operations in Oglethorpe County with large-scale irrigation set up.”
Corn is Brubaker’s only irrigated crop, but he also grows dryland corn, soybeans and sorghum. He said his crops need a half inch of rain a week to survive, but crops like corn would need more than 2 inches a week to thrive and make a profit.
“That’s just farming,” Brubaker said. “You have good years. You have bad years, and it can turn from a good year really quickly, just like it has done this year. We started out of the gate great, and were getting rain every few days, and that’s what you need. But when it turns off dry, there’s really nothing you can do but just sit back and watch.”
Farming isn’t the only operation affected by the drought and heat. Public Works Director Adam Nation has seen effects from the heat and drought.
A parked car near a communication tower on Buddy Faust road caught the grass and woods on fire and burned the car on June 20, he said
Nation said his crews will continue to stick to their mowing schedule even though the grass isn’t growing in some areas, and grading dry, dirt roads has been tough on equipment.
“We’re wearing blades out a little quicker, but we noticed that there just wasn’t enough moisture there, so it was really like powder once you got done grading them,” Nation said. “We kind of changed up our schedule, and we’re just trying to hit the areas that have potholes and washboards and just try to do spots rather than the whole road.”
Nation has tried to move up work times to accommodate heat in the past, but employees with children find it hard to change their schedules.
“What people have to understand is that the type of heat that we’re experiencing now is not the heat of their childhood,” Shepherd said. “In other words, the heat that we’re experiencing now has the signature of warming temperatures and climate changes.”