It’s a good thing swimming pools around Lancaster County have just opened because the week ahead will be unseasonably warm and muggy.
And that’s not good news for area farmers, where a deficit in precipitation around the county is making it hard for newly planted crops to shoot upward.
Nor for the county’s firefighters, who continue to be called out to brush fires.
“Unofficially summer,” is what Eric Horst is calling the unusually hot spell.
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Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Lancaster County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“This is like being in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, only it’s stink bugs instead of birds. When you step outside they jump on you. This is like a plague or something!”
That’s an exasperated Drema Brubaker, when the Asian invaders began swarming her family’s home in the woods near Mount Nebo in the southern end earlier this week.
“I’ve lived here since 1976 but I was so mad I was throwing a fit, saying I didn’t want to live here anymore,” she said. “I’m like a wild woman swatting them.”
Unfortunately, the Brubaker family’s new reality may play out in many other Lancaster County homes over the next several weeks.
ST. LOUIS – A deepening drought in the nation’s farm states has cut further into this fall’s harvest, with farmers now expected to pull from their fields the lowest corn yield in more than a decade.
But American farmers are still expected to produce their eighth-largest harvest ever, and while there’s sure to be a rise in prices at the grocery stores, there’s little risk of a failed harvest that would lead to shortages on the shelves.
The U.S. Agriculture Department predicted the nation’s biggest harvest ever in the spring, when farmers planted 96.4 million acres of corn – the most since 1937. But it cut its estimate a month ago and again Friday, saying it now expects the nation to produce 10.8 billion bushels, the least since 2006.
Read more: http://business-news.thestreet.com/the-mercury/story/us-farmers-expect-poorest-corn-crop-decade-0/1
Image via Wikipedia
Who would have ever thought proximity to Route 422 would be a litmus test for a good corn crop? Certainly not I. However, that is the case in Berks County. Farms south of 422 are in good shape and farms north of 422 are suffering.
July’s above normal temperatures, coupled with a lack of rain has caused tremendous damage to corn crops in Berks County located north of 422. Farms south of 422 received more rain and the clay-like soil holds moisture better. Most farms in Berks County do not use irrigation to water crops.
Berks County is not the only place where the corn crop is doing poorly. Nationwide it is estimated that corn yields will be down 40 percent! This translates into higher prices at the supermarket for you and I!
Another casualty of the heat has been milk production. Cows do not like heat (sounds familiar) and when they are hot they eat less and produce less milk!
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