Northeast floods devastate farmers as months of labor and crops are swept away

Well before it was warm enough to plant seedlings in the ground, farmer Micah Barritt began nursing crops like watermelon, eggplant and tomatoes — eventually transplanting them from his greenhouse into rich Vermont soil, hoping for a bountiful fall harvest. “The loss of the crops is a very tangible way to measure the flood, but the loss of the work is hard to measure,” said Barritt, one of five co-owners of Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm in Burlington, Vermont. Flood waters remain on the destroyed fields at the Intervale Community Farm, following last week’s flooding and this week’s rains in Burlington, Vt. This photograph provided by William Collins shows the string bean fields that were decimated at his farm’s fields by flood waters about a week earlier at Fair Weather Growers in Rocky Hill, Conn. Beth Whiting, who owns the farm with her husband, said even with predicted heavy rains they assumed their turkeys would be OK because they’d never seen flooding reach the area where they kept the birds. “Unlike Irene, this happened right on the cusp of harvest, so the crops are ruined for this year.” In Connecticut, Bryan Hurlburt, the state’s agriculture commissioner, said the flooding impacted about 2,000 acres of farmland, much of it in the Connecticut River valley.