The recent stretch of nice weather in Ithaca provided no relief for the community in the region that depends on it the most. With rain and cold prevalent from May through July and the resulting spread of plant diseases, local farmers felt the effect in their crop yields this past harvest season.

“The timing of the weather played a large role,” said Rob Gallinger, executive director at the Tompkins-Cortland county office of the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency. Rainfall between May and August increased by 2.9 inches in Tompkins County and 4.5 inches in Cortland compared to last year’s figures. Too much rain late in the growing season caused cherries to swell and split, and onions to become oversaturated and rot, Gallinger said.

Many of the 150 farming operations in Tompkins County and the 260 operations in Cortland County felt the repercussions of the weather in one way or another.

“We lost almost all of our tomatoes, and downy mildew wiped out almost all of our onions and shallots,” said Doug Neuman, who runs Buried Treasure Organic, a farming operation in Groton, NY, with his wife. The Neumans started farming in Groton two years ago, only to be met this year by poor weather conditions.

Many local farmers are in the same situation. “Most people I know had problems with blight,” Neuman said. The Tompkins-Cortland FSA office estimated that more than 10,000 tomato plants were infected with blight — the browning and death of plant tissues — this growing season.

The late rains and unseasonably cold weather impacted farming operations across the area. In the Tompkins-Cortland region, Gallinger estimated that poor weather led to a 40-percent loss of wheat crops and 50-percent of cherries. The prolonged rains also decreased the quality of hay in the region. Although the average customer at Ithaca’s farmers market may not demand the highest quality hay, the crop plays a fundamental role in the work of many local farmers.

A great deal of local farming operations are dairy farms, Gallinger said. These operations depend on hay to use as food for livestock. Too much rain decreases the nutritional value in the hay that farmers feed their livestock. The decrease in the quality of hay led to a decrease in the prices farmers could charge. “Nuisance rain,” days where it rained enough to prevent farmers from harvesting the hay, was also an issue for many farmers, according to Gallinger. Postponed harvests prevent farming operations from fulfilling orders in a timely fashion.

With losses of particular crops reaching 50 percent, many farming operations in the area are eligible for disaster relief from the Agriculture Department. A county must have lost at least 30 percent of a single crop before being eligible for relief programs, which offer farms low-interest loans from the federal government. However, many local farming operations do not carry crop insurance, which is a prerequisite for eligibility in many of the relief programs, Gallinger said.

Despite the widespread obstacles many local farmers face, some ended the harvest relatively unaffected by conditions of this year’s growing season.

“I didn’t really have a bad season,” said farmer Lin Davidson ‘71, president of the Tompkins County Farm Bureau and lab technician at Cornell. Davidson grows corn and hay that is processed into silage and haylage, both of which are used for animal feed. However, the corn and hay needed for this process does not need to be high quality and takes relatively little time to harvest. How a particular farm was affected this past season depends on what they grow, Davidson said

While some farmers were able to escape this season’s poor weather conditions unscathed, many farming operations in the Northeast are reflecting on their losses.

The situation for local farming operations is the same for many in New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut. Most counties in New York and New Jersey have been declared to be in a state of agricultural disaster. In Connecticut, farmers incurred huge losses in squashes, greens, tomatoes and potatoes. The Connecticut USDA office is waiting for the final figures to request disaster relief. While the federal government provides various forms of relief to farmers in disaster areas, most of the relief is in the form of loans.

“Most farmers don’t want to take out more loans,” Neuman said.