By Clint Thompson
South Georgia vegetable farmers have gone from one extreme weather event to the other in recent weeks. The lack of rainfall created abnormally dry conditions for most of the latter part of July. However, weather conditions changed this week with excessive rainfall.
Georgia producers like Sam Watson are having to navigate the weather challenges in preparing to plant their fall crops.
“We’ve gone from one extreme to the other,” said Watson, located in Colquitt County Georgia. “Right here in my area we had been dry. We’ve been bad dry, so with it being hot and dry, we had trouble getting through laying plastic. We had to stop planting because it was too hot. Now, it’s started raining, and it’s raining every day since the weekend. We need to be planting. We were holding off on planting, and now we’re getting behind a little bit. We didn’t want to be planting in the heat.
“It’s been pockets. Some folks are getting too much rain, and our area we were pretty dry.”
According to the UGA Weather Network, Moultrie, Georgia, received 2.08 inches of rainfall from Aug. 1 to Aug. 6. That followed 1.46 inches of rainfall from July 10 to July 31 in Moultrie. Albany, Georgia, received 4.06 inches of rainfall from Aug. 1 to Aug. 6 and 0.88 inches of rain from July 10 to July 31.
“We were so dry that we couldn’t lay plastic. I mean it was just like powder out there,” Watson said. “Now we’re starting to swing the other way, and if that continues, we could have some issues. But we needed some rain. We got it, but now we need it to hold off a little bit where we can get back to work.”
Once Watson is able to start planting again, he estimates that he’ll be planting into September.