Wisconsin’s heat troubling for some farmers

The dry, hot weather is proving to be quite a challenge for some vegetable farmers who are working overtime to keep their plants alive and producing in the heat.

Jia Kellum is a co-owner at King’s Hill Farm, a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Mineral Point. “We’re just doing the best we can with what we have,” Kellum says. “Trying to get as many crops watered and saved as possible. But some of the crops they have a certain life cycle. And that life cycle has been stunted. And the plants themselves are not growing, they’re bolting. Very interesting. I haven’t really seen anything like it.”

At Vermont Valley Community Farm in Blue Mounds, co-owner Barb Perkins says with no rain lately their water is also on a lot. “We are literally running irrigation around the clock on one or more fields,” she says. “We’re giving the crops an inch and a half water at a time. And two days after we irrigate you’d be hard pressed to know that they had gotten any water.”

Perkins says it’s been an unusual year at her C-S-A farm. She says they had to deliver vegetables to their members early this year because of the warm spring. And now, Perkins says, for the first time in 18 years they’ll have to skip a delivery this week, as they wait for some of their mid-season crops to produce.