Region dramatically improves from last year's extreme drought [photos]

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Continuing rains spurring better growing season in 2017

LaFAYETTE, Ga. - Mother Nature dealt a blow to Southern farmers in a late-season freeze that hit Georgia's peach and blueberry crops but continuing wet weather has driven out drought and even dry conditions from most of the tri-state region.

Across the region fields are green and hay, straw, corn, wheat, rye and other crops have rebounded considerably from 2016's historic drought. Walker County, Ga., remained at the center of the extreme drought bull's-eye until December. Even in April, parts of Northeast Georgia were still the driest areas in the U.S.

"It was the driest year that I can remember in my 80 years," beef farmer Benny Cross said last week, standing ankle-deep in hay cut to replenish supplies he used up in 2016. The Cross family usually keeps an extra barn full of hay for emergencies, but they used it up last year rather than buy hay like most other beef farmers did.

Cross' father, Ulyess Cross, bought 365 mostly wooded acres and moved from Harrison in 1939 after the Chickamauga Dam opened. The family operated a dairy from 1947 to 2007.

Now it's beef cattle, and that means lots of hay harvesting thanks to a rainy spring.

"We've been trying to get up some hay but it's been raining the afternoons for the last week, week-and-a-half," said Cross.

He can't help but chuckle at rain being a bit of a "problem," as he sat in the shade of trees around an old, unoccupied farm house on what's now his 500 acres on West Cove Road. The house was used in scenes in the 2011 movie "Water for Elephants," and now it stands in the middle of part of his hay crop.

The U.S. Drought Monitor issued June 1 showed the most recent storm system relieved drought conditions "in the hardest hit areas of Georgia and northern Florida." The report said that by the time the system had moved out on May 27, "much of the region had received more than double the rainfall - 2 inches or more - of what is typically expected for the week."

Some dry conditions persist in North Georgia's Blue Ridge Mountains but that area has dramatically improved from the extreme drought of last year.

Above normal precipitation - 1 to 5 inches - fell in Alabama, "resulting in drought improvement in all areas of the state," the report stated. Tennessee, which didn't suffer as much from last year's drought as its neighbors to the south, is now completely free of any dryness, the monitor shows.

The Tennessee Department of Agriculture's May 28 report said crops and pastures are in "mostly good to excellent condition," except for Mississippi River bottoms in the western side of the state.

"Showers the first half of the week produced a much-needed 1-3/4 to 2-plus inches of rain. Wheat continues to mature," Franklin County, Tenn., University of Tennessee agriculture extension agent Ed Burns said in the report. "Corn, cotton, and soybeans are off to an excellent start. About a third of the hay was harvested before the rain."

Alabama's crop report through May 28 is similar but wetter with rains slowing harvest in some areas.

Scenery at the Cross farm looks completely different now than last year, Benny Cross' son, Tommy Cross, said. On Thursday, Tommy and his brother, Gary, were tedding the hay - a process that uses a machine with spinning rakes to spread the hay to dry.

"This time last year we were already dry," Tommy Cross said. "We just mowed this field yesterday. We didn't want it to rain much on it because it needs to be dry when it's ready to bale."

The Crosses got only two cuttings of hay in 2016 and three-quarters of the harvest came with the first cut. The second cut was far less productive and of lower quality, he said.

This year, "most pastures are doing pretty good with all the rain," said Norman Edwards, the agricultural extension agent in Walker County.

"Last year's drought killed off a lot of the permanent grass," Edwards said. Farmers tried to replant but there was little rain last fall when that seed would have been sown, he said.

"It was December before it started raining so they don't have quite the same pasture they had," he said.

Meanwhile, Edwards and farmers in the area remain leery of forecasts that have called for drier weather this summer.

The rumble of diesel tractors filled the air a few miles to the east on West Armuchee Road in Walker County where the Scoggins family spent last week cutting straw and turning it into square bales. Scoggins Farm supplies straw to all the Lowe's stores in the Chattanooga district, Phillip Scoggins said.

Straw doesn't suffer from heat and drought like most other crops, so the super-dry weather wasn't the blow it was for other crops.

However, Scoggins' soybean crop - a crop planted after the rye grass is harvested for straw - only produced about a 20 percent yield last year from three plantings, he said.

"My father [Sonny Scoggins] and uncle [Alan Scoggins] have been doing this for years - 40 years, 45 years - and he said it's the first year they've ever lost the soybean crop," he said. "It's kind of strange how it went."

Now, rain's the problem because Scoggins needs to fertilize but can't because his trucks will get stuck in the mud.

"It's a double-edged sword," he sighed. "The rain is a blessing but if there's too much all the time keeping the ground too wet for us, we can't get the fertilizer trucks in to spread the fertilizer and we can't plant because the seed will rot in the ground or it'll crust over and it won't come through."

The drought was a lesson for farmers.

"Everybody around here was in a difficult situation. You can't depend on the past," Scoggins said. "You prepare for everything. You just have to hope for the best."

The National Weather Service's long-range forecast for the next three months predicts even chances for all outcomes, said Anthony Cavallucci, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Morristown, Tenn.

That means there's a33 percent chance of normal precipitation, a 33 percent chance of above normal precipitation and a 33 percent chance of below-normal precipitation, Cavallucci said.

The farmers will probably rely on their eyes and experience, he said.

"Every farmer I've talked to knows about as much about the local weather as I do," he laughed.

Contact staff writer Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569.