Months after relentless rain, family farms improvise to fill winter stores
Massive flooding left Vermonters with wet hay, forcing the farmers to adapt in the face of hungry livestock, serious illness, and the threat of spontaneous barn fires
By: Sophie Hartley
Up in the foggy hills of Orwell, Vermont, 435 silhouettes stumble over tree roots and granite outcroppings. They’re goats. And Holly Menguc has been worried about them since historic rain first hit Vermont this summer.
Menguc, owner of Tup’s Crossing Farm, places orders for 650 bales of hay each year. She planned to spend almost $40,000 on hay in 2023, but by late-August, she had only secured a sliver of what she needed. She wasn’t just coming up short — most of the hay she found was still wet.
Pasture grazed animals need hay during Vermont’s snowy winters, but continuous rain and severe flooding destroyed hay production throughout the entire state. Crops meant for feed made up the most significant damages, which are estimated to total over $16 million dollars, according to a survey from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.
In the aftermath, family farms like Menguc’s had to adapt to keep their animals alive through the coming winter. Months after the severe weather calmed, farmers are still fighting the fallout. They are navigating emergency aid applications, transitioning to new feeding systems, and grappling with the dangers of wet hay: listeria, mold, and the occasional spontaneous combustion.
“It’s hard to describe this growing season without using profanity,” said Carl Majewski, a field specialist in food and agriculture at the University of New Hampshire Extension who works with farms to improve crop and soil production. He said he hasn’t spoken with any farmers who had a good year. “It was just miserable.”
Hay fields span over 310,000 acres in Vermont — more than any other crop in the state. Over half of the 264 farms that were impacted by the summer flooding reported that they anticipated feed shortage. On the southern edge of Lake Champlain, Addison County was hit the hardest, with over $3 million in estimated losses. Matt Lawton, owner of Champlain Acres — a farm that primarily produces livestock feed — estimated his hay production was down almost 50% this year. “We’ve all had to kind of improvise,” said Lawton.
Often, small farms prefer square bales. They’re manageable, maybe 40 or 50 pounds, and easy enough to toss into the bed of a tractor for hayrides. Normally, Lawton distributes dry bales to over a dozen small farms, but his fields stayed wet. He was far from alone. In an emergency aid letter shared by Menguc, she recounted reaching out to multiple hay makers across western Vermont who told her they didn’t have dry bales.
Wet hay isn’t just unsellable; it’s also dangerous, according to agronomists. Hay is plant matter, full of fungi and bacteria. It can spoil, ruining it for animal consumption, or grow harmful bacteria, like listeria, which can be fatal to some livestock.
And every so often, it combusts.
Fire needs three things: fuel, heat, and oxygen. In the case of wet bales, the hay itself is the fuel. When it is cut, it doesn’t stop converting carbon dioxide into oxygen right away. This process is what allows plants to breathe and, notably, it also generates heat. Damp bales can also create the right environment for some microbes to thrive, and as the microscopic creatures feast on the hay’s nutrients, they generate even more warmth. When temperatures inside the bale rise above 130° — and they might when the bale’s moisture content is above 20% — the oxygen surrounding the hay can spontaneously combust. This process can take days or weeks, usually giving farmers time to spot faint smoke trails, but every so often, hay fires spark and spread, creating extensive damage.
Due to the dry hay shortage, many farmers turned to silage — damp hay wrapped in an airtight blanket of white plastic, “those giant-marshmallow-looking-things,” according to Majewski. After they are wrapped, silage ferments.
“It’s the exact same lactic fermentation that’s going on when someone makes sauerkraut or kimchi,” said Majewski.
This fermentation process increases the chance of listeria contamination, but it’s a chance some farmers are forced to take.
“We’ve been very, very wary of ever using it,” said Menguc. “It’s a risk, but that’s what we could find.”
Silage doesn’t come cheap or easy. The bales are hard to transport, expensive, and they can weigh up to 800 pounds. But by August, Holly Menguc was short 610 bales of hay, and silage was the only solution she could find. She needed to expand her barn’s concrete manger to accommodate silage’s size, and in addition to the cost of plastic wrapping, she spent almost $5,000 to transition her feeding operation from dry hay to silage bales.
Menguc applied for the Farmer Emergency Fund through the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA), which helped her cover the expenses. The fund was one of the only emergency resources widely available to farmers in response to the severe weather, and it is indicative of the scale of Vermont farmer’s troubles. Applications have skyrocketed, and as of November, they’re still coming in.
“Most years we gave out a handful of emergency grants,” said Lindsey Brand, NOFA’s Marketing and Communications Director, “This year, we’re giving out hundreds.”
