When people hear the word drought, they likely think of California. But there’s also an extreme drought in parts of New England. The Northeast is experiencing the worst drought in more than a decade.

The Northeast has more than 175,000 farms that produce more than $21 billion a year in food, hay and flowers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But this year, many fields are bone dry — and that has many farmers thinking about how to manage their land, their animals and the water that is there.

If you’re a farmer with an irrigation system, your crops could be just fine — or not. “We couldn’t work the land — we were so busy trying to put out irrigation pipe,” says farmer Mike Wissemann of Sunderland, Mass. His motto: Irrigation is irritation. Pumps break. Hoses kink.Warner Farm, which Wissemann runs with his family, is right on the Connecticut River. But he says that river water can’t be his primary irrigation source. To feed one thirsty field, another field has to go without.

“We depend on getting second crops in,” he says, “and we were unable to do probably 2 or 3 acres of sweet corn we would’ve done, another planting of summer [zucchini]” – usually an overabundant crop.

Warner Farm sits in a part of the Connecticut River valley where soil holds water pretty well, because it is rich with silty clay left over from glacial times. Still, Wissemann thinks his 10th-generation farm lost tens of thousands of dollars this year.

Help, or at least advice, is on the way, from soil and crop researchers like Masoud Hashemi at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“We’ve got a lot of farmers calling us, asking for some information about transitioning to no-till,” Hashemi says. No-till is a practice of leaving fields unplowed and planting crops on top of leftover vegetative matter from preceding crops…..more here