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Dry spell means more work down on the farm

By Staff | Jun 29, 2016

LITCHFIELD – A dusty, 20-year-old Jacob McQuesten, who helps run his family’s Litchfield farm, has had a country song playing in his head recently when he thinks about the lack of rain across Greater Nashua.

“All the time,” he said on Wednesday after touring the farm’s fields.

“It’s something about corn and whiskey. Rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey and whiskey is a good thing,” he said recalling the Luke Bryan song "Rain is a Good Thing."

“Rain,” said McQuesten, “is worth its weight in gold around here.”

The farm cultivates 250 acres of land in town and all of it is under stress from this season’s lack of rain, he said. The lack of precipitation means they have had to irrigate almost all the land – consisting of a wide range of fruits and vegetables – with water from the Merrimack River.

“Corn (is) number one. That’s our biggest thing and it needs the most,” he said.

Doug Webster, a weather columnist for The Telegraph and senior meteorologist with Schneider Electric in Andover, Mass., said Greater Nashua has been dry now for more than a year. And there is no end in sight to this dry weather pattern, which Webster said began in March 2015.

Only three of the past 16 months have provided the region with above-normal precipitation. From January to June, Nashua has had only 15.34 inches of rain, which is 8.75 inches – or 64 percent – below the average amount of precipitation.

“We are in what is termed a moderate drought now. Things will probably get worse with time,” Webster said. “Months from now it will probably turn around.”

On a humid Wednesday morning, McQuesten’s father, Matt, drove a red Farmall tractor over a dry field as visitors fussed over the rows of pick-your-own strawberries nearby. Clouds of soft, dry dust wafted in the breeze as the tractor slowly chugged along.

“This is very dry for us. This is like two or three inches of baby powder,” Matt McQuesten said during a break from the chore. “Things are growing. Not as quick and as big as they should, but they’re growing.”

If the crops do not receive the necessary amount of rain, farmers are forced to irrigate more often, which causes more of their money to evaporate.

“It’s another job added to the list,” the elder McQuesten said.

To make matters worse, the farm’s 1950s vintage Chrysler engine that powers a pump has been broken during the dry spell.

Down a shady path leading to the Merrimack River, Charlie McQuesten and Doug Merrill, the 74-year-old patriarch of the family business and a farm hand respectively, worked to repair the pump that takes water directly from the source through a hose and into a series of spray-heads on an elaborate galvanized pipe system. Irrigating adds countless hours and manpower to move all of the hardware by hand throughout the farm to ensure all of the crops receive water.

“We’ve got a system now. Grandfather drives; me and my dad lay it down, just keep going,” Jacob McQuesten said. “It’s always the hottest when you do it. We’ll probably move a mile of pipe at a time. It can be multiple times a day.”

The pumping system tries to make up for what the younger McQuesten says is the two-to-three inches of rain the farm needs every couple of weeks to see healthy growth on its own.

Webster, the meteorologist, said the soil dries out rapidly in the summertime.

“The rains we get this time of year (are) typically very sporadic. Rain doesn’t hit everywhere at the same time,” he said, adding that the region would not experience a drought situation now if precipitation had been near normal through May.

Jacob McQuesten scoffs when people get upset about the rain ruining their beach day.

“For us, it’s an entire three months of work going down the drain,” he said. “Not literally, because there’s no rain. But it’s just destroyed.”

Don Himsel can be reached at 594-6590, dhimsel@nashuatelegraph.com, or @Telegraph_DonH.

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