Weather May Cause Farmers to Lose Crops

208 :25 ( nat sound buggy)
Pooh Sprague hops on a buggy to visit some of his greenhouses on Edgewater Farm in Plainfield.
He grows vegetables and berries on about 70 acres of his 170 acre farm.
Inside his greenhouses, row after row of tomato vines rise to the roof.
Sprague plucks a red tomato from one; but it doesn’t look good.
210 :18 you can see on this tomato here, I think this is alternaria, an early blight getting on the tomatoes in here, and I’ve never seen this happen before
Tiny brown spots cover the tomato - a sign of fungal disease.
Sprague says he also has another type of fungus, called Botrytis, growing in a different greenhouse.
205 2:35 we see it in the field, we expect it in the field but we rarely, I’ve never seen it in greenhouses before, this morning I threw away about five or six pounds of tomatoes
Sprague says moisture normally present on plants in greenhouses typically dries off with the sunlight.
But weather conditions lately are making that difficult, and making the plants ripe for disease.
203 :50 this is our, our 35th year here, we can never remember a June certainly as grey, devoid of any sunshine, I think this is like the fifth or sixth day since Memorial Day that we’ve actually had a full day of sun.
That was on Monday.
And Sprague isn’t the only farmer wishing the sun would shine.
Becky Grube, with the UNH cooperative extension, says growers all across the state might lose crops this season.
She says farmers not only need sun, they need a lot more warm weather.
:54 some of the crops actually need warm temperatures to grow, so things like cucumbers, melons, squashes, tomatoes, peppers they really need the temperatures to be higher than 60 degrees during the day
Grube says that’s not happening in all areas of the state, which could lead to a really late season for some crops.
201 (nat sound)
At the farmers market in Concord, farmers are selling mostly kale, chard, and broccoli-all cold weather crops.
Wayne Hall is with Lewis Farm in Concord.
202 :30 the cold crops are growing really well the broccolis, the cauliflowers, but the root crops are very very slow, carrots, beets, usually we have a lot more beet greens a lot more carrots, this year very very slow.
Lewis Farm is the only one selling tomatoes here– although many aren’t very ripe.
202 1:10 we just need more sun we have tomatoes on our plants that are three or four feet off the ground, tomatoes all the way down the vine, but they’re green.
198 (Nat sound) 315
Larry Pletcher of Vegetable Ranch in Warner and Concord sells certified organic produce.
He says the rain wreaked havoc on his lettuce.
198 :16 lettuce in particular for us was hit hard, we probably lost half of our lettuce, even young lettuce growing in the field just starts to rot from the bottom up, I didn’t even bring in lettuce today to market.
Pletcher estimates he lost about 1,000 heads of lettuce.
9:41 during the downpour things were just, the aisles between rows were just rivers, it’s just standing water and it’s tough to deal with that situation.
The downpours also make it tough for growers to even have access to their fields to weed, plant, or spray fungicide.
But Pooh Sprague of Edgewater Farm in Plainfield says no matter how skilled, a farmer can’t control the weather.
And in farming, there are no guarantees.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.