CHARLOTTE — Weather determines feast or famine on farms like Drew Medlin’s. It takes the right amount of rain at the right time to ensure Medlin’s wheat, along with other crops across Union County, can produce enough good quality grain to make the growing season worthwhile.
“We’re really hoping for a bumper crop on this wheat so far,” he said.
This year, Medlin said his crops have a lot to make up for after a rollercoaster of extremes in 2024.
“You pray for rain, then you pray for it to stop raining, and then you don’t know what to pray for sometimes,” he said.
It started with a wet spring. Morgan Menaker, the field crops manager for the Union County Cooperative Extension Center, said many farmers had just planted corn when suddenly it began to rain nearly every day.
May went on to set a record in Charlotte, with more than 6.5 inches of rain falling in the first two weeks.
“Our crops essentially drowned in the field, so growers had to go back and spend the money to replant those fields to even get a crop,” Menaker said.
Meanwhile, Medlin said his winter wheat rapidly dropped in quality just before harvest time.
“The wheat was trying to ripen up. It was a time where it really required some dry weather, some good warm sunny days and all we had was clouds,” he said.
Those sunny days came in June, but then they just didn’t stop. Temperatures rose quickly, all that spring rain dried up, and suddenly, much of North Carolina was in a flash drought. It was another critical time for the corn crop, the pollination period.
Due to the dry weather, Medlin said he and most of his neighbors lost a significant chunk of their yield.
“It was a situation where we made less than half of what we normally make on our corn,” he said.
Some relief came in July and August, but the state was on track to have a drier-than-average year until Hurricane Helene. The storm dumped upwards of 20 or more inches in the mountains and about 4-6 inches in much of the Charlotte area.
Then for the rest of the fall, it barely rained at all.
By the end of 2024, North Carolina’s statewide rainfall average was about 53 inches, not too far off from the 30-year average of about 49 inches.
State climatologist Kathie Dello says most North Carolinians experienced 2024 as a year of extremes.
“We don’t live in the averages,” she said. “We live in the day to day, and if you’re a farmer managing your crops, or you are a storm water manager for the city, you don’t want to see four or five inches of rain in a day. You also don’t want to go four weeks without any rain.”
It’s a phenomenon the state climate office is calling “weather whiplash,” or quickly fluctuating periods between extreme dryness and extreme rain. Dello said it’s been happening more often across the state and much of the country as global temperatures rise.
“We’re juicing up the atmosphere with more moisture, and it’s just more prime to release these big events, then we’re not getting it in a normal, distributed pattern like we’d expect,” she said.
For farmers like Medlin, that’s making it difficult to plan for each growing season and every year feels like a gamble. He said crop insurance can help through one or two difficult years but he said it functions more like a band aid.
“If you have a bad situation or a bad year, it’ll help you make it to the next hopefully,” he said. “Year after year, you can’t collect crop insurance and keep going.”
The only solution is a good harvest, and that takes a thriving crop and weather that allows it.
“You never want to be the generation that loses the farm, that’s one of your biggest fears,” he said. “The buck stops here and you have to make it work.”
(VIDEO: Growing drought impacting crops across North Carolina)
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