BALTIMORE — Soon to be 65, T. R. Robinette has been raising cattle in the fields of Western Maryland practically his whole life.

And this year featured the worst drought he can remember.

Starting in late May and early June, pastures went dry, and cattle farmers like Robinette were forced to use bales of hay, usually reserved for the winter, to feed cows and calves, he said.

“We had cows that had calves on their sides, and that’s when we need good pasture to make a lot of milk for them cows, so those calves can nurse and grow efficiently,” Robinette said. “We had to feed a lot of our winter’s supply of hay to get us through.”

By the time he weaned the calves from their mothers this year, many were 50 to 75 pounds lighter than normal, said Robinette, whose farm is located in Flintstone, east of Cumberland.

During a year when lengthy dry spells climbed into the record books, coupled in the summertime with stretches of extreme heat, Maryland farmers endured crop loss, impacts to livestock and equipment fires, and they’ve turned to federal aid programs to make up for the damage. And amid climate change, many are bracing for more years like 2024.

Recent rainstorms have provided some hope that cover crops — planted in autumn to slow erosion of farm fields through the winter — will sprout in time after weeks without precipitation, said Steve Connelly, deputy secretary of the Maryland Department of Agriculture. But even a bit of late-season luck wouldn’t undo the hardship of the growing season.

“Our hearts go out to the farmers,” Connelly said. “Because it’s been a tough year for them.”

Maryland saw different effects

Conditions varied around the state. Pockets of Maryland, including Garrett County, a chunk of southern Maryland and the lower Eastern Shore, have seen 8 or fewer inches of rainfall than normal so far this year, said Jeremy Geiger, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service office in Sterling, Virginia.

But the other areas were near, or even above, normal, Geiger said.

Final harvest numbers aren’t fully tallied yet, but the year’s harvest for local agriculture, including key products like corn, wheat and barley, seems variable too, said Shannon Dill, principal agent at the University of Maryland Extension in Talbot County. It was all about timing — when in the growing cycle that dry spells hit, she said.

“We have seen some OK yields, and we’ve seen some very, very bad yields,” she said.

State officials haven’t set any mandatory water restrictions, but much of the state is operating under a drought watch or warning, and Oakland in Garrett County has instituted restrictions due to dangerously low levels in the lake that provides its water supply.

The problem this year, in many cases, was extended dry periods, even if the rest of the year was fairly wet, Geiger said.

In Baltimore, a run of 38 days without any measurable precipitation — ending on Nov. 9 — set a new record, eclipsing the previous record of 32, set in 1963. At the NWS monitoring station out west in Hagerstown, the run was 27 days in November, tied for 5th place on the all-time list.

Such dry conditions during the summer weren’t as record-setting, but were even more dangerous, starving plants like corn and soybeans of hydration when they need it the most. Some parts of Maryland experienced what’s known as “flash droughts,” with a quick switch to extremely hot and dry conditions in the early summer.

State’s drought severity triggered federal funding

Of Maryland’s 24 counties, 18 received a secretarial disaster declaration for drought from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Kimberly Graham, assistant deputy administrator at the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. The designation opens up aid programs such as emergency loans, she said.

This year, more than a quarter of Maryland counties reached “D3” status, as determined by the U.S. Drought Monitor, which categorizes droughts from D0 to D4, with D4 being the most severe.

The designation automatically unlocked aid funding specific to livestock for affected counties back in July, namely Allegany, Garrett, Washington and Frederick counties.

The Maryland office of the federal Farm Services Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has given out about $900,000 through the Livestock Forage Disaster Program.

That program compensates farmers for lost grazing opportunities and increased feed costs amid drought conditions, said Russ Clanton, deputy state executive director for the office. The office has also received a few claims for noninsured crops and livestock deaths, Clanton said.

“We had a few people in the Western Maryland counties who have never participated with us before, who came in and signed up,” Clanton said. “We did a lot of outreach.”

Several Maryland counties reached the D3 designation in November, including Kent, Queen Anne’s and Caroline, Clanton said. But for a few of those counties — Cecil and Harford — cattle grazing season had already ended by that time, meaning the livestock forage program won’t be open to farmers in those jurisdictions. Farmers there can, however, apply for emergency loans, Clanton said.

Hans Schmitt, assistant secretary for resource conservation at the Maryland Department of Agriculture, was one of the Maryland farmers who had to repair his combine after it caught fire during harvest time this year.

The incidents aren’t terribly uncommon, with dry chaff capable of clogging air intakes and other machinery, but they are particularly dangerous during a drought and amid high winds, Schmitt said. Driving through his fields, Schmitt saw the effects of dry soil, clouding the air with dust.

“It was so dry and so dusty, it was sometimes hard to see where you were going,” Schmitt said, adding that he’s grateful his combine has an auto-steering feature.

Schmitt — who farms corn, soybeans and wheat, alongside wine grapes, green beans and lima beans near Queen Anne’s County’s Sudlersville — said the fire on his combine was quickly extinguished and the damage was repaired by replacing its wiring harness.

But he isn’t sure other farmers were so lucky, and combines are among the most expensive equipment many farmers own, Schmitt said.

Schmitt said he expects his crop yields for the year will be below average, but he’s thankful that the damage wasn’t more severe. It could be because of advancements in drought-resistant varieties of several of his crops, he said.

“Considering the conditions of what the summer went through, we were very fortunate,” he said.

Strategies made drought less painful in some places

Other farmers were able to mitigate the effects of the drought using irrigation systems, and paying to run them at key times, Schmitt said. Some opted to run the systems this fall after planting cover crops, which is rarely if ever necessary. But it was this year, he said.

“That’s definitely what we need, but we need more.” Schmitt said. “Gentle rains spread out over a long period of time, that’s the ticket.”

Amid changing climate conditions, which are expected to bring higher temperatures and more severe and sustained droughts, some Maryland farmers are working to adapt.

A 2019 study from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, for instance, estimated that by 2080, Maryland’s climate will more closely resemble Mississippi’s.

Nadine Burton, a farm management specialist at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore Extension, encourages farmers to embrace alternative techniques and produce.

At her farm in Princess Anne, called Tallawah Farms, she grows a diverse array of plants from other parts of the world, some of which are more accustomed to warm weather, including okra, bok choy and the Caribbean leafy vegetable callaloo, often using hoop houses to grow indoors.

Strategies like this help farmers be more resilient against bad weather years, but they also require upfront capital, Burton said. Through the UMES Extension program, she aims to spread the word, and connect farmers to funding programs that pay some of the cost upfront, she said.

“If we diversify our crop offering, we will be in a better situation,” said Burton, who hails from Jamaica. “And not only to weather the storm, but we’ll be filling the gap, or creating niche markets, to make us more economically viable.”

For Robinette, this year meant that many of his family’s “side businesses,” which usually bring in extra profits to sustain the cattle raising, ground to a halt. The roadside stand that usually featured fresh cut flowers and pumpkins was sometimes empty, he said. Luckily, this year, he did get a little help from the federal government, thanks to payments from the livestock forage program.

But he, and many of the farmers he knows, are pressing on. In his case, that’s what his family has been doing for generations.

“We do it because we love to do it,” he said. “We try to break even, and if we can make a dollar, that’s great. If we can’t, we just keep going at it again the next year.”

“We’re pretty resilient. We don’t let a little thing like that stop us,” he said.

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