Harvestville learns to roll with climate change punches | Daily Gate City - Keokuk, Iowa

The owners and operators of Harvestville Farm are keenly aware of Mother Nature’s whims and moods.

Julie Hohl told Rotarians that she and her husband, Adam, run Harvestville– a fifth-generation, traditional Midwest farm.

“On our main homestead, we have about 250 acres of traditional row crops: corn, soybeans, alfalfa. For many, many years, we had a couple hundred head of cattle, several thousand head of hogs,” she said. “So pretty traditional.”

When Adam was in high school at Central Lee, he did an FFA project raising and selling pumpkins.

Years later, Julie, who is from St. Louis, and Adam met, married and started a life together.

Around 2004, they did a lot of traveling back and forth between St. Louis and Donnellson to help Adam’s dad with the farm, and the pumpkin patch was restarted. Before long, the family moved back to the farm.

The wagon holding pumpkins grew to become a tent, and then a barn, which was built in 2008.

“Went from a couple of rows of pumpkins to five acres of pumpkins,” she said. “Now we’re 30 acres of pumpkins, squash and gourds….(with) over 125 different varieties that we grow and…(we expanded to include) family activities and added all of our other seasons.”

Climate changeJulie Hohl said everything they do is affected by weather.

“It’s not only just our fall season,” she said. “When we have our fall season, when we have tons of people…(weather) also affects our farm-to-table dinners, it affects our flower fields as well and our festivals as well.”

Over the past five years, Hohl said, they’ve had the highest temperatures on record.

“And that is the most change that we have seen in the past five years. This is our 20th year in business. And we have definitely noticed the most change in the last five years,” she said. “Extreme weather patterns. It’s not foreign to any of you that are in here. But high winds, varying temperatures, heavy downpours, lots of flooding, hail and we have a new term – not so new to us anymore – but derecho, which was not really in our vocabulary a couple years ago and now it’s a little bit more prevalent.”

The weather dictates the time of planting, the crop yields, and availability for activities and events, Hohl said.

“Every single crop that we grow, we are reliant on Mother Nature,” she said. “We do not do any irrigation at all, so we are completely at her mercy.”

Rising temperatures have been a factor, Hohl said, especially with crops and growing seasons.

“They can accelerate or extend them as well and they can also affect the yield too, which then also affects the pest and disease control,” she said. “When we have lots of moisture… (it) leads to more pests,” she said, noting their crops’ vulnerability to environmental conditions. “It’s just a domino effect, constantly with it.”

Additionally, Hohl said there is a lot of soil erosion that can happen.

“The way we go around that is we rotate our crops every year and we always have crops on our fields at all times. So we’ll have a winter crop in, a cover crop in constantly to help prevent that,” she said. “But it also changes the composition of our soil too, so we’re constantly having to get our soil tested, send it off to Iowa State. It’s always changing. Once we think we have it figured out, we’re wrong and we have to re-evaluate and kind of start from scratch it seems like each year.”

With such fertile soil, Hohl said, when there are heavy rains, weeds are especially prevalent.

“And chemicals that used to work years ago, they don’t necessarily work anymore,” she said. “So we’re constantly battling that as well.”

The farmers are also finding that certain crops may no longer be viable in the Midwest.

“Some things that used to be prevalent here are not as prevalent anymore,” she said. “We sometimes have accelerated or delayed growing for our fruits and vegetables.”

More frequent weather events, Hohl said, have also driven an increase in insurance costs.

DinnersHarvestville’s farm-to-table dinners are a popular activity in the area, and are held in the barn.

“Our barn is not insulated. It was a conscious decision at the beginning, to be truthful, to save money,” she said. “So we don’t have air conditioning in there. So, especially if you come to a farm-to-table dinner during June and July and stuff, it is a little bit warm, it’s not too bad.”

The Hohls have been hosting farm-to-table dinners since 2011.

“Last year we had to cancel and reschedule two dinners because of heat. We’ve never had to do that before. And it was in the month of June,” she said. “We are right now in the works to insulate our barn in the next couple of years to give us more control. We can open it whenever we want to, air condition it when we want to, we can heat it when we want to.”

Handling adversity

The Hohls have to be “just constantly proactive,” Hohl said.

“Understanding the planning for environmental impacts, learning to embrace the change. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is very frustrating and a pain,” she said. “But we just have learned in our business you just have to roll with it and pivot and shift, pivot and shift is what we do I feel like constantly. And that’s how we thrive each year.”

The farmers are constantly working with Iowa State, she said, “with researchers, agronomists, specialists, to help us stay up to date as best as we can on what the trends are to help us kind of get ahead if you will with all of these changes.”