Officials get firsthand accounts of ‘weird’ year for farmers
It’s been a weird FINDLAY — year out on the farm, thanks to climate change.
That’s what about 50 people — a mix of elected and appointed officials, government employees, business leaders, and private citizens — heard throughout the day last week as they split seven hours visiting all three northwest Ohio farms that comprise the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Blanchard River Demonstration Farms Network.
The tour was arranged by the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments.
The field-level research program was created with $1 million of federal money in response to the 2014 Toledo water crisis which left nearly 500,000 people in the metro region restricted from drinking or touching tap water the first weekend of August that year.
Toledo’s water was fouled back then by an algal toxin that grew out in western Lake Erie.
Scientists now believe as much as 93 percent of western Lake Erie’s algae-forming phosphorus load comes from nonpoint sources such as agriculture every year from March 1 through July 31, according to a 44-page mid-project summary produced by the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
While participants got to see several of the latest farming techniques aimed at reducing runoff and keeping both rainfall and fertilizers on the land, they also heard how the profit margin for farming these days is marginal at best during ideal growing seasons — and this year’s was anything but that, given unusually heavy and persistent rain that began last fall and continued well into this summer.
It kept about 40% of area crops from being planted.
“We’re not making excuses,” Aaron Heilers, Blanchard River Demonstration Farms Network project manager and a Shelby County farmer, said. “Agriculture’s committed to doing things to improve water quality. But there are the realities of economics and weather.”
A glimpse at northwest Ohio’s changing climate was included in the summary report that was distributed to attendees, with data showing rain events of an inch or more on the rise since the 1960s in places such as Bowling Green, Celina, Findlay, and Defiance. Equally as important, it shows heavier rain coming in spring when farmers are planting seed and fertilizing it.
The data in that report is consistent with what was released last fall in the latest National Climate Assessment, America’s most comprehensive summary of climate trends in this country. That showed the Midwest with a 42% increase in major storms over roughly the same time period, putting this region second only to New England.
“Let’s stay out of the politics of climate change and what’s causing it,” Mr. Heilers said. “But the reality is that out on the landscape, things are changing and we have to deal with them.”
Greg LaBarge, an Ohio State University associate professor who’s part of OSU Extension, called 2019 “a year of extremes” because parts of Paulding County were so dry that farms were irrigated this summer while Toledoans groaned about how much rain they were getting.
About 54 percent less fertilizer has been applied in the western Lake Erie basin since last October because of the persistent rain, Mr. LaBarge said.
The first farm the group visited was a grain farm where Chris Kurt, a fifth generation farmer, grows corn and beans on a 500acre site in Hardin County.
Mr. Kurt has the unique perspective for a couple of reasons: He was a Toledo-area resident when the 2014 water crisis hit. And he’s a banker who sees many of the struggles that area growers are having, especially after this spring’s rain kept many of them from planting. He said he farms on a part-time basis.
Participants learned about edge-of-field research being done at 14 western Lake Erie basin farms and six outside the watershed by OSU’s Kevin King since 2011.
One of the more surprising results so far has been that cover crops are great at removing nitrogen, an important algae-forming nutrient, but have thus far done little or nothing about curtailing phosphorus, the fertilizer most associated with bloom size and the one for which runoff-reduction goals are focused upon, Jed Stinner, a USDA hydrologic technician, said.
Other stops were made at Kellogg Farms in Hardin County, a 5,000-acre grain operation, and Stateler Farms in Hancock County, where 7,200 hogs are housed and several dozen acres of corn and soybeans are farmed.
Co-owner Anthony Stateler said his swine operation came within days of hauling manure to an Ottawa County treatment facility at great expense this spring because his farm’s 2.5-million-gallon storage facility nearly became full, something which rarely happens.
Under normal circumstances, 60 to 70% of the hog waste generated there gets spread on the Stateler family crop fields, with the rest sold to area farmers.
But Mr. Stateler remembers the exact date - Oct. 23 - that the rain came so heavy last fall and kept much of northwest Ohio land too wet to spread manure on it until late May.
“There were a lot of sleepless nights here (because of the rain) as there were at a lot of places across northwest Ohio,” he said.