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Hello everyone and welcome to Real Virginia, a show about Virginia agriculture and the people who produce the wonderful local products we enjoy.

Brought to you by the Virginia Farm Bureau.

Farmers dealt with a more familiar challenge than COVID-19 last year.

Bad weather.

Chef Tammy Brawley shows us how to make a palate-pleasing fresh pesto.

And we visit Scenic Highland County in this week's County Agricultural Close Up.

Atlantic to my heart.

Welcome back to Real Virginia, everyone.

We're coming to you this week from Hill Farm in Louisa County, where it's cold and dry.

But last year, 2020 was record breaking for Virginia rainfall.

Ricky Gibson has more on how it affected farmers and their crops.

While 2020 was a remarkable year for everyone, Virginia farmers dealt with an old nemesis.

Excessive moisture.

In addition to seeing one of the warmest years on record in the old Dominion, several localities received record breaking rainfall, and rainfall statewide was above average.

For instance, 62.65 inches of rain fell in Roanoke last year, the most ever recorded.

Farmers in the Richmond area saw the third highest level of precipitation in the books.

Farmers in Southside Virginia said the trouble started last spring and just got worse.

We had significant amounts of rainfall in both May and June, specifically the third week of May and the third week of June.

It rained pretty much all week, both those weeks of each month.

And to survive the summer, and it doesn't like too much water too fast.

So obviously, in a perfect world, we prefer June to be dry and uh July to be wet.

But we had the exact opposite this year.

Um right at planting, we had a frost the second week in May, which we later found out at the end of the season was more detrimental than we thought to begin with.

The late freeze in March kind of slowed field work up, slowed crops up that were already in the field.

Um the organic produce we put in the field around April the 1st.

Um that was growing well.

We started and then we planted tobacco after that.

Late, late April, early uh May.

Um, everything was growing well, and then we got to June.

In June, the second week of June, I believe, we had about a week of rain, solid.

And so with the organic produce in the field, the cabbage especially, cabbage grows from the inside out, and it grew so fast in that week that a lot of it burst and split.

And so that's not marketable.

So I lost probably 3,000 pounds to the acre of organic cabbage in the field due to the excess of rain from that one week.

It's easy to see how excess rain can damage crops.

But growers say weather extremes can affect an entire crop season and beyond.

We get into late June, it turns dry.

And uh it got dry normally with that.

Tobacco is starting to fill out, starting to come in the top in July.

And so we started to have to irrigate in at least in my area.

Some other areas weren't as dry.

Um, we had to irrigate for about two weeks or so.

Then it started raining again.

And that was helpful for the tobacco, but say my neighbor that I partner with with uh old Dominion Organic Farms, he had squash in the field.

Well, all that excessive rain brought on disease in the field, and he lost a lot of his squash production.

Um with that dry spell and then the wet spell.

I believe it hurt the uh quality of the tobacco that we had in the field.

Um, a lot of growers had fields where the some spots in the field were still green at at harvest and all the spots were ripe and yellow like you wanted it to be overright.

The soybeans kind of hit the magic window.

That dry weather didn't really hurt them because they didn't really start putting on pods and beans until August.

So that was great for them.

Um, of course, wheat we got ate the fee, uh did have a little lull in trying to get wheat out the field and um when it was rain early on in June, you know, had some um struggle, not struggle, but you know, a few days and wet weeks and dealing with wet land trying to get soybeans in the field after we planted after wheat.

And um when it was rain early on in June, you know, had some um struggle, not struggle, but you know, a few days and wet weeks and dealing with wet land trying to get soybeans in the field after we planted after wheat.

Um the uh and then obviously with my sweet corn and stuff, I had to water some of that because that was in July.

Farmers are used to adapting to weather, but many say 2020 was unusually rough on their yields.

The Virginia corn crop shrank five percent from 2019 to 2020, while soybean production increased 24% thanks to good growing conditions later in the season.

Tobacco production declined a bit from the previous year, while cotton yields did better than expected.

In other years, livestock producers have suffered when it turned too dry.