The owners of Pine Lane dairy farm in Contoocook have long gambled by raising a big part of the corn and hay needed for their cows on flat land that is designed to flood.

But they didn’t have much choice.

“Agriculture land is hard to come by in New Hampshire because houses have gone into fields. The land isn’t there anymore; we do the best we can,” said Kelly Holden, whose wife, Caroline, is part of the Houston family that has owned the farm for three generations.

Last week, their gamble fell through as the torrential rains that have done so much damage in western New Hampshire, central Vermont, western Massachusetts and parts of New York flooded the fields they lease in Henniker, part of the Hopkinton-Everett Lakes flood management system. It wiped out at least 100 acres of corn and hay that were earmarked as cattle feed.

Heavy rainfall last weekend, on top of two months of wet weather, has left a lot of farms struggling. Even if they weren’t washed away, as happened in hard-hit Vermont, or flooded like Pine Lane Farm, they’re affected.

“Everybody is struggling with not being able to get into their fields if they’re making dry hay because the ground is just so wet. … Even if the fields clear up, the ground is so wet that if they put heavy equipment on it, it will shred the ground,” said Sarah Allen, dairy state specialist for the UNH extension.

This is particularly harmful because last year was also bad, although for a different reason.

“Coming after the drought last year, we don’t have a ton of feed inventory. If we’re going to have two years of short feed. that’s going to be hard,” Allen said. “A lot of farms are at the point that they’re making due, but can only be stretched so far.” Holden said Pine Lane Farm will be “short at least a couple hundred bales, round bales, of hay.” Each round bale weighs about 500 pounds.

Pine Lane Farm saw similar flooding of the Henniker fields about 20 years ago, Holden said, but that was later in the growing season. This year’s flood was disastrously timed.

“Corn, when it’s not tall enough, can’t get oxygen – it drowns,” he said. “We’ve also got about 25 acres of hay that’s going to be no good,” partly because of accumulated silt from the rushing water.

Since you can’t get flood insurance on land in a flood-control zone, the farm is left scrambling to buy replacements before it’s too late, at a time when feed prices are climbing fast due to floods in the east and drought out west. The farm has launched a GoFundMe account, seeking to raise $75,000 to cover those costs.

“I need to start purchasing feed now; if I wait, I know I’m going to be in trouble,” Holden said.

“In the past we’ve dealt with this ourselves but this is too much,” added Holden, who described the GoFundMe request as “bare-bones,” saying “it’s going to cost more than that in the end.”

Pine Lane Farm has a little over 400 cows and is milking 220 of them. It is mid-sized by New Hampshire dairy standards but tiny by the standards of farms in the Midwest and West.

Pine Lane Farm has about 120 tillable acres on the home farm in Hopkinton – about five acres of which flooded from the Contoocook River during last week’s rains – and rents fields to raise cattle feed throughout the area, including on Dimond Hill Farm in Concord. Like all dairies, it is struggling in the face of low milk prices.

]]>