Drought Also Takes Toll of Human Spirit

At the red-brick, white-steepled Mt. Zion Baptist Church in this tiny farming community, prayers for rain are now routinely included along with entreaties for the sick and shut-ins at Sunday services.

“And now, let’s remember the rain,” says the prayer leader as heads bow and lips move silently in fervent appeals for divine intercession.

It is going into the third week since farmers in this region of rolling fields and groves of stately oaks and hardy pecan trees have seen a good rain or relief from the heat. And before that, the drought stretches back to early spring.

The result has been devastating. Crops are being decimated; irrigation ponds are going dry; beef and dairy cattle are suffering as pasturelands wither and stored hay supplies are depleted.

“If you ride by one of these fields and see that you’ve done put about $25,000 in it, you’d either start praying or start drinking, “ said Derris Jones, 46, a member of Mt. Zion Baptist who farms 2,000 acres with his brother Larry in a four-county area around Chula.

Chula is not alone in its anguish. Across the South, a prolonged dry spell, abetted by a record heat wave with temperatures often topping 100 degrees, has cut a path of destruction that threatens to turn this year into the worst in history for the region’s farmers. Rainfall has been as much as 20 inches below normal in some areas, with temperatures as high as eight degrees above average.

In Virginia, half the corn crop is dead, raising the total losses in agriculture to more than $60 million. In North Carolina, officials estimate that $400 million of the state’s annual $4-billion farm income has been lost. Agriculture Commissioner Les Tindal of South Carolina says his state’s losses “will be in the hundred-million dollar category when all is counted.”

In Alabama, the toll in agriculture could amount to $100 million for both peanut and soybean farmers and $50 million to $100 million for cattle growers. The state’s small $35-million wheat crop has already been written off.

Spurred by appeals for federal aid, a U.S. Agriculture Department task force toured Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina earlier this week to get a first-hand look at the drought damage. The group, headed by George S. Dunlop, an assistant secretary of agriculture, visited farms and met with officials in each of the four states.

“We’re heading for one of the worst disasters Southeastern agriculture has ever experienced,” Rep. Robert Lindsay Thomas (D-Ga.), whose congressional district stretches over southeast Georgia, told the task force. “I don’t know of anyone with a crop in the ground and a considerable investment in it who can survive this without outside help.”

State of Emergency

Georgia Gov. Joe Frank Harris has declared his state an agricultural disaster area. Crop and livestock losses have reached an estimated $140 million and are still climbing.

It is a story told by the corn and peanut farmers in Chula; by the watermelon producers in nearby Cordele, the self-styled “Watermelon Capital of the World”; by the mustard and turnip green growers in the red-clay-and-pine country just south of Atlanta, and by the chicken and cattle raisers in Lula, in the hilly northeast section of the state.

Big farmer or small, veteran farmer or neophyte, well-off farmer or debt-ridden--virtually none has been spared. Moreover, a devastating toll has been taken in the spirit of these rural Georgians, for whom the land is more than a livelihood but part of their souls.

The withered leaves of the stalks, baked brown by the sun, rustled like starched silk as Derris Jones trod through his cornfield in the broiling afternoon heat. Beneath his booted feet, the sandy soil was dry and dusty.

“This should be about head high to me now with a couple of big ears on each stalk,” the husky, 6-foot-tall farmer said as he waved an arm over the parched and stunted corn crop that barely reached to his chest.

“But it hasn’t had more than seven inches of rain since it was planted. And I can’t afford to water it. You don’t waste your water on $1.80 corn. That’s how much it’s bringing a bushel. I’ve done lost $125,000 just in corn this year.”

He plucked an ear from one of the stalks and pulled back the husk, revealing a shriveled, worthless cob with misshapen and missing kernels.

Multiple Bad News

The loss of his 200-acre corn crop follows bad news of his wheat crop, which was off by 25% of the anticipated harvest, and a lower-than-average yield from his watermelon fields.

“The dry weather is hurting everything,” said Jones, the son and grandson of south Georgia farmers. “We had a lot of rain in January, February and March, but in April it started to turn dry on us, and it never has rained much since then.”

But more than the losses in these other crops, Jones is worried about the potential toll on his peanut crop. Half of the 2,200 acres he and his brother farm is planted in peanuts, but only about half of that is under irrigation.

Where the giant irrigation rigs wheel slowly around the field, spraying water pumped through underground pipes from ponds, the peanut plants are lush and vividly green, shooting down into the moist earth the “pegs” that form the embryonic peanut pods.

But where the plants must rely on nature for water, they are thin and silvery in color with strings of aborted “pegs” that are broken off as they attempt to penetrate the sun-hardened soil.

Needs Rain in 10 Days

“If we don’t get a good rain in the next 10 days, we’re talking about a loss of $200,000 or $300,000 or maybe $400,000 in the peanut crop,” Jones said.

Already this year, Georgia peanut farmers have suffered an estimated $90-million loss in what is the state’s No. 1 cash crop, or almost one-fifth of the anticipated harvest.

Jones, who says a one-year drought won’t wipe him out completely, remains philosophical. “I just keep thinking things will get better,” he said.

Cordele, the “watermelon capital” of 10,914 residents about 60 miles south of Macon, was bustling as townspeople and farmers from miles around gathered to celebrate the annual Crisp County watermelon festival last Saturday.

Floats with huge, brightly colored papier-mache watermelons assembled for the morning parade down the vintage main street. Youngsters wearing tasseled fezzes and brandishing hand-held watermelon-shaped fans jostled one another for the best spots along the parade route. Vendors offered mountains of bright green watermelons for sale from the beds of pickup trucks.

But along with the gaiety and excitement there was disappointment and pain.

“Lucky to Be Alive”

“I’m lucky to be alive,” said Oren Childers, a 42-year-old Cordele farmer who grows peanuts, soybeans and wheat, as well as watermelons, on about 1,000 acres.

“The weather patterns seem to have changed from our past. We don’t get our summer showers like we used to. We don’t get our rain in the spring like we normally do. We’re having to water all the time just to get our crops up.”

John H. Woodard, also a Cordele farmer and president of the Crisp County Farm Bureau, said that the watermelon yield in the region was off by between one-third and one-half this year. Fortunately, however, the prices watermelon farmers received in the market remained high at 5 to 8 cents a pound.

“I’ve been farming 40 years for myself and I’ve never seen it dry this long at one time,” he said. “We’ve prayed many, many times for rain. But still, when the good Lord is ready, he will send it.”

Bob Nash, president of the Macon-based Georgia Farm Bureau, said that this year’s drought would force many farmers to fold, unless they find a way to restructure their crushing debt loads.

“We ought to be knee-deep in water right now,” said Richard Minter as he stood with a visitor on what is now the bank of an irrigation pond on his 250-acre spread in Fayette County, just south of Atlanta. “But the last good rain we had here was the last day in November last year.”

The standpipe in the middle of the green water tells the story: a four-foot deficit.

Minter, 29, said that he is irrigating only crops he considers safe bets, such as sweet corn, collards and turnip and mustard greens. With the cost of labor to rig the portable pipelines and of gasoline to power the pump, any marginally profitable crops are automatically excluded.

Drought Forces Caution

“You get more cautious in a year like this,” he said.

Minter, who got into farming just six years ago after graduating from the University of Georgia with a degree in business administration, said the drought has made him question his decision to go into farming.

“It hasn’t been very good for rain at all really since I began farming,” he said. “Like in ’84 we had some rain. But for the most part, it’s been dry since 1980 here. But I guess I can’t make up my mind to do anything else. Farming gets in your blood.”

Bobby Miller pulled his maroon High Sierra pickup truck in front of a 400-foot-long chicken house and shouted to a farmhand inside: “Hey, Bob, how many chickens did we lose last night?”

Bob Smith, wearing cutoff blue shorts and no shirt, sauntered over to the truck. The news wasn’t bad, he said: “About 60-65.”

Miller sighed with relief. He remembered the day earlier this month when the temperature shot up over 100 degrees and claimed 3,000 of his 35,000 6-week-old chickens.

Two Pits of Dead Poultry

Already, two new pits were almost filled to the top with dead poultry. Another pit would have to be dug soon.

“Chickens are like dogs,” he explained. “They don’t sweat. They have to pant to keep cool. And when the temperature is too hot, all that panting exhausts them and they keel over dead.”

The thermometer was menacing now. Outside it registered 105 degrees, sending sheets of shimmering heat off the aluminum roofs of the chicken houses. Inside was not much better, despite the fans and foggers that spray a fine mist into the stream of air: the long red needle on one thermometer quivered near the 100 mark.

“If we don’t get some wind pretty quick, we’re going to start losing them,” Smith told his boss.

Dips Into Winter Feed

The chickens were not Miller’s only worry. He also has a herd of nearly 250 brood cows, heifers and calves. The dry weather and heat had ruined the grass crop, leaving only spikes of dog fennel and clumps of pigweed growing in the parched soil. To keep his herd from starving, Miller has had to dip heavily into the hay ordinarily reserved for feeding during winter.

In Lula, a community of 1,000 in northeast Georgia where Miller lives, as well as elsewhere across the South, farmers are taking their cattle to auction in record numbers in the face of dwindling hay stocks. Because the cows are younger and lighter than they ordinarily would be, that has meant a stupendous financial loss.

An emergency airlift of hay donated by Midwestern farmers has been of only modest help. “So far 76 farmers in South Carolina have received about 3,500 bales of hay from the Midwest,” said Daniel McNeill of Clemson University’s agricultural extension service. “It’s a generous gift, but obviously with us needing thousands and thousands and thousands of tons of hay per day. . . . “

Miller has contemplated selling off his herd and trying to cut his losses. Doing so, however, would mean that he would have to take another job for a few years in order to save up enough money to replace the stock.

That is a prospect the 35-year-old farmer does not face with equanimity. Until this year, farming had been good for him and his family: his wife, Gale, and his two young daughters.

Now, he said: “You get worn out and depressed from the work. It would just cover you under if you didn’t say to yourself that it’s going to get better one day.”