Gauging for water

Bradley County farmer Donnie Ownby says last year's rains have erased the drought, but the ground now is too wet to plant.

Signal Mountain apple grower Chris Roberts says his gut tells him it will be a muggy, hot spring and summer, but his biggest fear is a late freeze.

North Georgia farmer Stacy Gray says he believes the region's weather pattern has changed, but he's hopeful for a "halfway normal year" this summer.

The farmers, though, have to take it all on a leap of faith and fate.

"Only the man upstairs knows for sure," Mr. Ownby said Tuesday as he squeezed a handful of dirt into a tight, damp ball.

Farmers in the tri-state region have had a tough decade, caught in crop-growing seasons of extremes, according to National Weather Service records. Four years from 2005 to 2007 were among the driest on record at Chattanooga over the past 160 years, records show.

And, while rains may have seemed near-constant over the winter, so far in 2010 the area is 2.16 inches below normal, according to the weather service.

Jerry Hevrdeys, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, says the long-range outlook for the year is for below-normal precipitation and near-normal temperatures.

According to the weather service, the driest year on record in the Chattanooga area is 1968, which had only 35.04 inches of rain, compared to normal rainfall of 54.52 inches.

But 2007 is the second driest ever recorded, with only 38.62 inches of rain, according to Terry Getz, senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Morristown, Tenn.

The wettest year on record is 1994 with 73.70 inches, Mr. Getz said. In comparison, 2009, with 62.59 inches of rain, was the 17th wettest on record, he said.

NO CRYSTAL BALL

Mr. Roberts, who for about 40 years has nurtured about 1,500 apple trees on seven acres at Walden's Fairmount Orchards, said he doesn't use weather forecasts or the Farmer's Almanac projections.

"There's no crystal ball to figure out what's going on. That's just part of the thing with being a farmer," he said. "You never know what weather's going to deal you, so we just deal with it as it comes."

Mr. Ownby, who last year lost money on his sunflowers because of heavy rain, said he'll plant fewer flowers this year to make sunflower oil.

"There was just too much rain for sunflowers. In this part of the country, they say we should get about 1,500 pounds (of flowers) per acre. We got six," he said. "But they were pretty."

This year, Mr. Ownby will have to wait out the continuing cool temperatures, along with this week's expected rain.

"If you work the ground when it's too wet, (the soil) will come up waxy," he said. "If it comes up too wet, when the sun gets on it, it will just dry into a hard ball, and it's hard then to get it broken up again."

If farmers work soil when it's too dry, it will just blow away, and seeds sown without moisture won't germinate, he said.

Mr. Gray, who grows row crops on about 800 acres in Walker County, Ga., said he is taking a wait-and-see attitude on whether the weather cooperates.

"We're not into planting season yet -- the end of March or the first of April," he said. "So we've got a few weeks before we see if it's too wet, too long."

Mr. Gray hopes he'll be planting soybeans in May or June, but one concern he's beginning to have is whether the extreme cold of this winter has put his wheat crop two to three weeks behind in maturing.

"Where you're double-cropping, this is what you get into -- you've got to get the wheat crop out before you can put in the beans," he said.

Noting that "farmers always complain," Mr. Gray chuckled and said he actually thinks this year may offer a chance for "a halfway normal" summer of rain.

"We'll just roll with the flow," he said. "When it's a bad year, I eat beans and 'taters, and when it's a good year, I eat the same. So whether it's good or bad, I still eat beans and 'taters."