Prickly Neighbors in a Dry Land

Sitting on a stone wall near a red barn, Jim Bowers looked past the field of corn that died with its ears on, past the brook that babbled for half a century before it dried up, past the cattle slated for slaughter this summer because they’re eating all the hay meant for this winter.

What he saw beyond the trees was the frontier of suburbia: miniature mansions built on quarter-acre plots, all with wells that Bowers figures aren’t big enough for both hot tubs and bean crops.

“I think [lack of] water will bring development to a screeching halt,” said Bowers, 70, who raises cattle and grows vegetables on 1,400 acres of farmland that rolls right up to the backyards of a new housing development here in the Delaware River Basin. “And probably put some farmers out of business.”

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who lives in the same county as Bowers and has a lawn just as badly burned, declared a drought emergency in New Jersey on Thursday, following the lead of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and several communities by banning lawn sprinkling and car washing.

The crisis has brought immediate hardship, especially for farmers and those who sell their goods. And as it deepens, the drought is heightening long-term tensions between growers and herders, golfers and homeowners, developers and environmentalists over how to allocate a resource that usually seems infinite in this part of the country.

The drought actually began in July 1998, continued through a mild and dry winter and became frightening when it rolled right through the usually stormy spring. The stricken area appears to be getting bigger, and the only relief possible would be a long, steady rain or a hurricane, said Bob Hirsch, chief hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.

“It’s spreading to New England. We’re seeing it spread from Ohio into Indiana,” he said.

Since June 1, Newark, N.J., has had only 22% of its normal rainfall. Rain at Baltimore-Washington International Airport has been more than a foot and a half below normal over the last year. Scattered showers across the region Thursday put little dent in the problems.

Across New England and the Mid-Atlantic, officials have imposed an array of restrictions with penalties that range from fines for watering lawns to jail time for soaping down cars. Measurements of stream flow, the standard used to monitor drought, are reaching record lows almost daily, Hirsch said.

The dry spell has caused millions, perhaps billions of dollars in damage, not the least of which is the $60,000 field of corn to which Bowers bade goodbye.

The drought has contributed to a spate of fires in crackly dry fields that won’t be yielding any winter hay. It has driven deer to raid crops with abandon to find any sort of moisture. And it has crippled the landscaping business and prompted perpetually puttering gardeners to finally let the forces of nature win a round.

New Jersey’s peaches--behind only Georgia’s and California’s in sales--are sweeter but smaller this season because there is less water content. The apples also stand to be smaller. “Nobody wants to buy small apples in the fall,” said Meredith Peters, an extension service expert on fruit management.

For livestock growers, who generally raise breeding stock for sale to big beef producers in Wyoming and Texas, the drought has meant no second harvest of hay to be stored for winter feeding. “Any cow that isn’t pregnant is gone,” said John Hargreaves, a Hunterdon beef farmer and president of the New Jersey Beef Council. Hargreaves was paying $85 a day to feed his 63 breeding cows until his supplier cut him off and he had to dip into his own winter stores. Now, he’ll have to cull the herd.

Despite the crop losses, the drought probably won’t affect nationwide food supplies or prices, according to federal officials, because the nation’s largest farming regions, including California, are not affected.

The calls to the Hunterdon County Master Gardeners’ hotline, which offers tips on America’s hottest leisure activity, have dwindled. “They’re throwing their hands up and letting Mother Nature take its course,” said Martha Marleta, a horticulturist with the Rutgers University Cooperative Extension Service in Hunterdon County.

Nearby, Garden State Growers continues to water 75 acres of potted plants meant for gardens from Chicago to New York. It uses 10 million gallons a month in the hopes that gardening will get hot again.

“The stuff looks good,” said General Manager Ron Harrison, staring at barracks, greenhouses and open-air sections of pansies and azaleas and marigolds. “It’s the people who buy the stuff that are killing me. Business has just dried up, so to speak.”

For competitive reasons, Harrison won’t say how many people he’s employed, how many he’s had to cut back or how many plants he normally sells. But the chains that he focuses on, the Wal-Marts and the Home Depots that depend heavily on garden equipment and supplies, are putting their plants up for clearance and packing up their lawn mowers. His business is down by much more than half.

“The Northeast is ridiculous,” said Harrison, who ships from North Carolina to New York but who focuses on stores in metropolitan New York. “It’s just a 200 square miles where we’re just not getting any rain. We are getting beat up.”

Yet the business took heat during the drought last year when some neighboring wells ran dry. Last weekend, Frank Hoff’s old and relatively shallow 50-foot well stopped giving water. It takes up to two months here to get a new one drilled, thanks to the drought. His property abuts the giant nursery operation, and he tried to be diplomatic.

He said water conflicts between farms and homeowners are endemic. “They’ll be shooting each other pretty soon,” he said.

It isn’t clear to what extent the effects of the drought have been exacerbated by the sprawl of suburbia, though runoff from streets and driveways into storm sewers and big homes too far from city water clearly don’t help.

“We’re getting to where California was a hundred years ago,” said Win Cowgill, county agent for the Rutgers extension service in Hunterdon County. “We’re just getting to that point where we’re going to have water wars.”