Video: The Drought Of 2016 Hits The Dairy Farm

LAMAR COUNTY, AL. (WCBI) – Dry weather is helping some area farmers extend harvest season, but it’s not all good news.

The drought is hitting dairy farmers particularly hard. No rain in more than a month means bare pastures with no grass, and a lack of cattle feed.

Dairy Farmer David Gilmer starts his day on the pasture every morning at 3 a.m., but here recently, his mornings haven’t been so green.

“This is no doubt the driest period that I’ve seen in the 40 years that I’ve been doing this now. We’ve had, I can think of two or three other years that were closer, but this is by far the most severe drought that I’ve seen.”

The dairy cows on the Gilmer Dairy Farm have pretty much consumed everything in the fields, so hay has been brought out a month early.

“Our silage crop ran about 45% of normal this year, and our hay crop probably about the same thing. Right now, we carried over hay from last year, and that’s going to help a lot.”

The drought is leaving a huge question mark on three things: the farm, feed, and future.

“Normally us and a lot of other people, whether it’s beef farmers, or other dairy farmers, we’ll plant a winter crop, ryegrass, or wheatgrass, wheat oats, that kind of thing, and you know we can usually expect a lot of fall graze, and a lot in the spring. We haven’t planted a seed. There’s no point, it won’t come up.”

Gilmer doesn’t think the drought will affect dairy prices, but says it will affect farmers bottom line because input costs will be more.

“For what’s produced in this area, really has no affect on the national pricing systems, so it’s just going to make it hard on the local farmer.”

Rain, and lots of it is what Farmer Gilmer is praying for.

“If we have one of these pop up thunderstorms, you know, if it drops 2 inches, that’s not really going to do us any good, it will run off, but you know, what we need is a good, slow three or four days of rain. We need a system to come here and stall out.”

Gilmer says the heat and drought causes heat stress on the cows, and can even cause other types of sickness and infection.