Cool, wet spring puts damper on Ill. niche farmers' crops

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Terry Starks planted the first crop of herbs at her central Illinois farm this spring and hoped to harvest them sometime next year.

Instead, she's looking at a droopy, wet mess.

"I put in about $600 worth of herbs, and that stood under water for a good three days," said Starks, who grows crops in Williamsville, about 12 miles northeast of Springfield. "I'm hoping that's going to come out of it."

The cool, wet spring and heavy rains of the past week are bedeviling small-scale niche farmers like Starks across Illinois and Indiana. The sweet corn, tomatoes and other crops they sell directly to restaurants and consumers through farmers markets are growing slowly and, in many cases, aren't planted at all because of muddy fields.

That means some crops might not be around for a while, said Chuck Voigt, a vegetable-crop expert at the University of Illinois. And there probably will be periods this summer when, no matter how bad you want an ear of sweet corn or a vine-ripened tomato, you won't find many at the local farmers market.

"Just based on what I've seen here, I think there's going to be a later season on most of the local produce," Voigt said. "I think there's going to be gaps in the supply, probably a lower overall supply."

At Blue Moon Farm just north of Urbana, Ill., John Cherniss said he's running a couple of weeks behind on a lot of his planting. And about three-fifths of his 16 acres are too wet to plant anything, he said Thursday.

"We need it to dry out or likely we won't be able to plant some summer crops," Cherniss said.

Every acre left unplanted would cut a typical niche vegetable farmer's sales by $25,000 to $40,000, he said.

And Cherniss has another problem: Tomatoes he's already planted are growing slowly because the weather was cool the first couple of weeks they were in the ground. That means they'll bear fruit right around the time Cherniss expects his next set of tomatoes to be ready to pick, leaving him with more than he can sell to his usual buyers.

Cherniss expects he'll have to find wholesale buyers, who he says might pay a seventh or an eighth of his normal sale price.

"We're not used to getting 30 cents a pound for tomatoes; we're used to getting two-fifty," he said.

Todd Vincent's troubles are worse.

He planted a half-acre of strawberries last year at his farm in Lake Fork, Ill., 15 miles northeast of Springfield, and expected them to start producing berries this year. The berries are there, he said Friday, but "half of my field -- the most productive half -- is under water."

He doubts the plants will bounce back. That would rob his 10-acre farm of up to $7,500 in sales.

Some farmers markets and restaurants that rely on niche growers can look elsewhere for what they need, said Mosbah Kushad, a food-crops specialist at the University of Illinois.

"If they don't have it, they'll go out and get it from other states," he said. "They'll have to pay more."

Others, like Restaurant Tallent in Bloomington, Ind., will stick with what they can get locally.

"The tomatoes are going to come in later, I know for a fact," sous chef Tom Bullock said. So the restaurant will do without them for a while.

And the strawberries the restaurant buys, he said, aren't as good as he's used to.

Weather forecasts for the next week or so across Illinois and Indiana include several potentially sunny, warm days. And that means farmers could still get crops in the ground and salvage the summer, according to Linda Connelly.

Her Terra Dea Farms in Athens, Ill., about 15 miles northeast of Springfield, doesn't yet have its usual assortment of vegetables planted.

"I've got a lot of plants that I need to get into the ground that I just can't," she said. "Tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers."

That said, "if it doesn't rain this weekend, I might be able to get in the first part of next week."