Recent rains end Georgia drought as farmers look ahead to fall harvest

Recent rains have officially brought Georgia out of a severe drought, and farmers are looking ahead to the fall harvest.

Dry conditions have heavily affected farmers in Georgia for nearly a year, but the National Weather Service recently announced that Georgia’s drought is officially over.

Local farmers were hit hard by the dry spell. Brandi Whitney of Serenbe Farms said they had to irrigate their fields constantly.

“Oh, we had to irrigate almost all the way through until the nighttime,” Whitney said. “So I would leave it on during the daytime. I would go home and eat, and then I would come back in the evening time to turn everything off, so yeah, it was a long period of just rotational everyday irrigation.”

When the rains finally did come, the ground was too hard to absorb the water properly, causing flooding in fields and additional crop loss.

“The soil was so compacted that when it rained it didn’t have anywhere to go, and erosion follows the path of least resistance so we had a lot of flooding in our field areas,” Whitney said. “There were a lot of crops that we lost.”

However, Whitney said she believes they made it through the worst.

“So we’re really excited,” Whitney said. “For us, the fall is the greatest time of the year. It’s the longest-producing on this farm, so we’re just hoping for a steady rain so that we don’t have to irrigate so much. Our plants are healthy and strong in the ground. They’re not having to be stressed by the heat or the lack of water from rain and that sort of thing.”

Farmers with livestock are also seeing the benefits from the summer rains, producing green pastures and more natural pasture growth for their grazing herds.