Roy Brown’s boots sank two-inches into the muck, pushing rainwater to the surface of his unplanted field.
There should be strawberries where he's standing. There should be beans and beets taking root in the fields behind him. But there aren't.
His beans rotted in the wet ground. His beets drowned when their soil washed away. And he can’t even begin to lay down the lining for his strawberry fields.
Brown, like many farmers in the Alachua county area, is losing the battle with the rain.
“The continuous rain has caused a lot of concern for growers,” said Aparna Gazula, the commercial horticulture agent at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Alachua county extension. “You can’t get farm equipment onto the field to till the land to get it prepped for planting. The flooding can lead to disease development in the plants."
For Brown, that means cutting his season short.
He normally closes his Hawthorne farm to the public during the summer and reopens in fall. But this year, he won't have a harvest large enough to sell until October.
“Normally we do have a window where it is wet, where we do have torrential rain. But this year, it has continued for 10 or 12 weeks,” he said. “Flooding is something that’s out of our hands. Out of our control.”
Brown wears a short-sleeved plaid shirt and heavy jeans. He lives on 40 acres of plowable ground, four of which are allocated as “U-pick” strawberry fields — fields where the public may pick crops for a low cost. His 99-year-old father lives in the house on the property, and Brown himself lives just down the road.
The flooding affects everybody, Brown said. He said he can’t afford to employ ten full-time workers like he’s used to doing, and he has recently had to turn a lot of people down.
The work he does have involves rushing to soak up as much of the flood as possible. He has a tile-drainage system in place, which helps, he said, but it hasn’t solved the problem.
“Some farmers try to lay the field out or slope it in such a way that you can have the water drain away from the field,” Gazula said. “But in recent days, the rainfall has been so heavy that even those kinds of steps to prevent flooding might not work.”
The system on Brown's farm can defend against one-inch of rainfall in a 24-hour period, Brown said. But he’s seen three or four times that in just the past week.
“As long as it quits in the next few weeks we’ll be fine,” said Brown. “But if it continues on through October, we’re really in trouble."