After a Drought Last Year, Ohio Farmers Wished for Rain. Now Downpours Are Destroying Their Crops – Inside Climate News

The water in the creek was rising quickly, and Paul Tomcho could not reach his herd.

His southeast Ohio property—the aptly named Creekside Farm—was getting more rain than anyone in living memory could recall. Tomcho, who logs daily rainfall for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), measured the total downpour at 4.28 inches in one hour. A calculator offered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told him it was a one-in-a-thousand-year flood.

“My hope is that that’s correct,” Tomcho said with a laugh. “You know, we’ve been getting hundred-year floods like every three years.”

Tomcho raises goats and sheep. During the downpour, his animals were grazing on the other side of the creek, which had surged over its banks and into the field. If the animals stayed where they were, the current would carry them away—which is exactly what happened to several of Tomcho’s fenceposts and about 40 tons of stone in the back of his barn.

“I had a diesel can that was inside the barn, and then the next day, I found it a mile away in the creek,” Tomcho said.

Tomcho’s animals were smart enough to move away from the rising water, but the structural damage from the downpour still cost him a few thousand dollars to fix. His experience is one of the more striking examples of how climate change-fueled unpredictability in weather is challenging small farmers, many of whom do not qualify for government assistance. Frequent extremes damage infrastructure and ruin crops, destroying many of the investments farmers make at the start of each year.

Tomcho said that between January and July, his property experienced 163 percent of its average precipitation. All that water has turned some of his paddocks into a “muddy mess” unfit for grazing, and the moisture has created a breeding ground for parasites. So far, his herd still seems healthy, but he warned that could change quickly if he doesn’t stay vigilant.

It’s a stark contrast to last year, when an extreme drought gripped the same region. At that time, Tomcho’s major concern wasn’t parasites, but food.

“We had to get creative with finding ways to have enough feed for the animals during the growing season,” Tomcho recalled. “Last year … some pastures, we couldn’t even really graze.”

He also had to buy hay for the winter—an unexpected, and unwanted, expense for a product he normally prepares himself.

For Lindsay Klaunig of Trouvaille Farm in Athens, Ohio, this year’s rain initially came as a relief. The 2024 drought wiped out about $20,000 worth of her fruit and vegetable crops—enough to make her wonder seriously if she could continue farming. For a while, it looked like the spring rains would give her a chance to rebound.

But the rain just kept coming. By late July, Klaunig had lost all of her fruit and most of her onions. She also suffered a weeklong bout of heat sickness, and while she was recovering, she lost more plants. Meanwhile, several of her beds were overrun with weeds.

“I was so happy just to feel the rain that I wasn’t really processing that it was impacting yields. … I was a little too chill about it,” Klaunig said. “I’m really not gonna make much money this year. It’s probably going to be about like last year.”

Extremes Upend an Already Unpredictable Profession

Tomcho recounted a joke an “old-timey farmer” once told him: “There were these two farmers chatting, and one of them said to the other, ‘Remember when the weather was perfect?’ And the guy responded and said, ‘Yeah, that was a great week.’”

That’s how farmers generally view the weather: It’s never perfect, and no two years are exactly alike.

“As a journalist, right now, you’re trying to figure out how to write this story, how to put it together. That’s how it is on a farm, you know? Every day, we’re writing a story, working with the land. The land is our subject, so we’re questioning the land every day and seeing what it tells us,” Tomcho said.

For Kara Olsen, that’s part of the fun.

“It’s one of the reasons I love farming so much, because it is just this challenge that keeps you constantly engaged and constantly problem solving,” she said.

Olsen is a relatively new farmer who moved from Colorado to southeast Ohio three years ago to start Attican Farms. Since then, she’s seen the weather swing from one extreme to the other in ways she never experienced.

“To go from nothing to everything is a lot,” she said with a laugh.

Like her friend Klaunig, Olsen had high hopes for her spring crops. Instead, the rain washed away her early plantings. Three rounds of beets, two-and-a-half rounds of carrots, two rounds of peas, three rounds of radishes—all seeds she’d bought with her own money, lost.

“It really was just really, really impactful for us in a negative way,” Olsen said. “We normally show up at market end of May, beginning of June, and we didn’t get to consistently attending market until two weeks ago [in mid-July].”

“The land is our subject, so we’re questioning the land every day and seeing what it tells us.”

— Paul Tomcho, Creekside Farm

The wild variation from one year to the next makes planning almost impossible.

“I had several people say something last year … like, ‘Oh, you should be farming cactus,’” Klaunig said. “Honestly, there’s a part of me that wants to be like, ‘Yeah, good thing I didn’t farm cactus this year, huh?’”

That’s the challenge for small crop farmers: They have to buy their seeds and prepare their fields before they know what the weather will bring. In theory, they can plan their growing seasons around a typical range of temperatures and precipitation. But the conditions are increasingly falling outside both ends of that range. Klaunig said she doesn’t know how anyone is supposed to plan around that.

“It would be one thing if it’s one crazy year that’s an aberration, and you just don’t make that much that year, so you hunker down and the next year, you make up for it. And then you put aside money and put in infrastructure for the next time you have a crazy year,” Klaunig said. “But you can’t do it when it’s every year.”

Adapting to an Uncertain Future

Olsen said if she can still capitalize during fall and winter, she won’t fall too far behind despite her losses this spring. She hopes to reinvest the revenue she generates into expanding the size of the farm.

“Time is really our most important commodity. … And so maximizing that’s important. And for us, that means getting the right tools for the job to cut down on labor so that we can invest it in other places,” Olsen said.

She also hopes to benefit from planting diverse crops.

“We’re growing 50 different types of peppers. I have 20 different types of cherry tomatoes,” she said. That’s nice for her customers at the farmers market, who like having options, and it also helps her identify the hardiest strains for future seasons.

“I have certain tomato varieties, for example, that did really well in the drought and are still doing really well right now, so next year I’ll know to grow more of those,” Olsen said.

And variety does increase the likelihood that something, at least, will grow. Last year, Olsen’s New Mexico chilis thrived in the drought; this year, the New Mexico chilis aren’t doing so well, but her Korean chilis (Korea is hot and humid) are loving the extra moisture.

Farmers around the world are contemplating similar strategies, according to Tom Smucker, a geography professor at Ohio University in Athens who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture.

“If you’re in the Andes in South America, there’s just such a wide variety of root crops or different potato varieties … In some cases, they’re just kind of broadcasting a lot of different seeds with a lot of different vulnerabilities and more resilient characteristics that, the ones that meet the needs for the moment are gonna grow,” he explained. 

Smucker’s research focuses on East Africa, which has a much different climate than southeast Ohio. Nevertheless, Smucker said, there are broad parallels between what farmers in the two regions are noticing.

“We have to prepare in the context of a lot of uncertainty—that we could have really severe drought one year, and the next year, much higher rainfall than we’re used to,” Smucker said.

Farming is an inherently risky business, but that risk does not apply to all farms in the same way. That’s why one of Klaunig’s goals is to expand her CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. In a CSA, community members give a farmer money at the start of the growing season in exchange for a cut of whatever the farmer produces.

“Something I’m interested in is asking people to share risk with us. Commodity farmers, livestock farmers, they have ways in which the government shares risk with them because there actually are insurance and entitlement programs, and as specialty growers, we really don’t,” Klaunig said.

Commodity crops are products such as wheat, corn or soy; they’re typically grown on large farms and receive the most government subsidies and crop insurance. Specialty crops—which include most common household fruits and vegetables such as apples, potatoes and onions—get little to no government support.

There are “a few [programs] that supposedly exist, but we didn’t qualify for any of them,” Klaunig said. “They’re just not well-designed, and they’re not going to actually work, and … there’s not many people who actually use them.”

These are policy decisions that mostly come out of the federal farm bill, which last passed in 2018 and which Congress was supposed to update in 2023. It still has not done so, leaving farmers with a bunch of policies written before the COVID-19 pandemic upended global supply chains. What was once bipartisan legislation has grown increasingly contentious amid disagreements over commodity subsidies, funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and conservation programs.

That last item is especially important for small farmers, said Adam Blaney of Blaney Family Farms. He’s used money from a conservation program called EQIP to build two $40,000 high tunnels—climate-controlled structures which he said are exceptional mitigation tools for extreme weather. If he could, he said, he’d grow almost everything in them.

“It’s just really expensive. Not many small farms can just say, ‘Yeah, let’s just get $40,000. No big deal,’” Blaney said.

It remains unclear when Congress will approve a new farm bill or what conservation programs will look like in the future. In the meantime, Olsen said she’s focusing on “low-input” solutions: farming methods that require fewer resources, often by taking as much advantage of the natural environment as possible.

“I’m just really trying to build a resilient system on the farm, as opposed to constant reactions,” she said. “And who knows? It might not pay off. It might not be the right solution. But for me, I think for a first step, it makes the most sense.”