Early in November, Chicago-based AP reporter Melina Walling and AP photojournalist Joshua Bickel spent a few days with local farmers during the peak of harvest season, and asked them how the tornado and this summer's flooding affected their livelihood.
They followed and interviewed Graves and Calloway County farmers, including Justin Ralph, Keith Lowry, Jed Clark and Adam Kough, as well as University of Kentucky cooperative extension agent Miranda Rudolph.
The resulting feature article and photographic essay debuted on the Associated Press website on Sunday. It has already been posted nationally on ABC News, agricultural web pages, as well as dozens of TV and radio stations in Kentucky and around the country.
The entire article, video and 15 photos can be found here . There's also an excerpt posted below:
Justin Ralph estimates he’s made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They’re accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans and wheat to market.
What they’re not used to are the distances they’ve had to drive the past couple years. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky — a massive facility that bought and stored millions of bushels of grain from farmers. But it was destroyed in the 2021 tornado outbreak that killed dozens of people and leveled entire parts of the town, and the company that ran it shut down. Now, instead of driving ten minutes, they sometimes travel an hour or more.
“The swings in the weather events that we have ... that’s kind of scary,” he said, especially for those with smaller farms. “If you’ve got a larger farm operation, your acreage is spread out over a larger area, so the risks are probably minimized more because they’re spread out more.”
That’s already a reality for the area around Mayfield, which is in a flat coastal plain region in the western part of the state and which has been hit by extreme weather in more ways than one. In addition to the 2021 tornado outbreak, this summer they were hit by flooding that surpassed 10 inches in some areas, submerging crops.
Keith Lowry, another farmer near Mayfield, woke up one morning this summer to eight inches of rain, and by dinner time, when the deluge finally stopped, knew he had a problem.
Lowry found fields of half-submerged corn, soybeans that had disappeared under the flooding almost entirely and rapids rushing from their spillway like a waterfall. Now, at harvest time, he estimates that they lost between five and 10% of their crop this year.
Although he took some losses, he says that he and other farmers are used to dealing with uncooperative weather. “That’s the nature of the beast,” he said.
The compounding effect of those natural disasters has had lasting impacts on a community where agriculture is at the heart of commerce.
“Because we have such a big county that’s really heavily populated with grain farmers, the loss of (the grain elevator) has forced them to move to surrounding counties, oftentimes 40 or 50 miles away to transport their grain,” said Miranda Rudolph, the University of Kentucky’s cooperative extension agent for Graves County. She said that fuel costs have risen, adding to the strain.
Jed Clark, for example, who farms about 3,000 acres of grain near Mayfield, said that he relies on crop insurance and also tries to spread out his crop rotations strategically, betting that crops in a low-lying area will do well in a dry year and that crops on higher ground will outlast the ones that are washed out when it floods.
The capability of a smaller farm to survive also has to do with infrastructure, said Adam Kough, another Kentucky farmer who has a mostly family-run 1200 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat (as well as two swine barns and 100 sheep) between Mayfield and Murray. He thinks the farmers who were hurt the most after the tornado were those who didn’t have grain storage on their land. And he said that while some farmers turn to irrigation to get them through sudden and intense droughts — he’s seen those same irrigation pivots end up in standing water after intense and sudden floods.
On the Net:
Original AP article
