美国成立“干旱应急基金”

去年夏秋两季这一带地区都很干旱，现在农业部官员表示国家首次成立干旱应急基金。合作推广部县级林业员Jon Nute说：“这真是让我们吃了一惊，政府走的这一步非常好。”

美国农业部国家机关的农业计划专家Marilyn Ricker说美国农业服务机构的紧急保护计划为希尔斯波罗县提供了34，000美元资金，虽然数额不是很大，但这笔费用可以帮助他们提高现有果园和葡萄园的灌溉系统或者用于购买管道或挖深井，或为牲畜提供清洁饮用水。

Ricker 说“我们没有足够多的农民去灌溉，今年夏天我们看到的主要是牲畜没有水喝。本来一个水井足矣，但因为缺乏降水，地下水位很低，一些水井都干涸掉。”

这笔钱只提供给去年由干旱导致严重损失等紧急情况的农民或牧民。它将支付50%的永久性措施用费和75%的临时性措施用费，例如给干渴的牲畜运送饮水的费用。

Mont Vernon地区最后一个奶牛场的合伙人之一Kevin Pomeroy说“我知道在坎特伯雷，George Gilnes每天可以产1,000加仑”他说Pomeroy农场很幸运。上世纪六十年代钻的一眼井至今可以供许多黑白花奶牛饮用。每头牛每天可以喝掉一浴缸的水。在Milford，Trombly花园一直使用Souhegan的河水进行灌溉，但是今年水位太低，Sean Trombly不得不投资了25,000美元用来建设“调水灌溉”系统作为后补，以防万一。

在合作推广部，Nute说他曾听说了一些农场池塘的问题，这些池塘通常都是浅池塘挖深的区域，水源来自溪流和地面渗水，池塘是一个饮用和灌溉用水的储水池。一些农场池塘在低于某一水位后，水泵里抽出的水里就会有很多碎片。

像以上一些案例，紧急救助资金可以资助他们扩大池塘，安装水泵，或者寻找新的水源。

这项基金任何人都可以申请，包括所谓的业余农民，农业是一个家庭的年收入的一部分。到目前为止，这是Greater Nashua 最普遍的农业存在形式，每年最少可以生产价值1,000美元的产品，就可以被定义为一个农场。因为需要提交受损详细资料且受一定赔偿金水平的限制，有些“夫妻”农场将不能获得基金支持。

Nute说“我期望这项基金用于帮助真正的商业农民们，可能会有大量的申请表。”他说，尽管如此，任何帮助的获得都很重要。不论天气变得如何干旱，新英格兰农场有句谚语叫：水--少了比多好。Nute 说：“农民宁可干旱也不期望有很多降雨，因为旱了他们可以浇水，涝了却不知如何排水。但这次他们确实害怕了，眼巴巴的瞅着他们池塘里的水越来越少。”

Emergency drought funds designated for county

Anybody with a garden knows that last summer and fall were dry hereabouts, and now agricultural officials are confirming it, offering emergency drought funding in the county for the first time in many years.

“This really surprised us that the government stepped up,” said Jon Nute, county forester with the Cooperative Extension. “It’s nice they stepped forward.”

The money isn’t huge – just $34,000 in emergency drought funds are available for Hillsborough County through the U.S. Farm Service Agency’s emergency conservation program, said Marilyn Ricker, agricultural program specialist with the USDA’s state office.

The money can help pay for such things as improving existing irrigation systems for orchards and vineyards or paying for pipelines, deeper wells or developing springs to provide water for livestock.

“We don’t have a lot of farmers with irrigation systems,” Ricker said. “Primarily what we saw this past summer was water for livestock had dried up. It was a situation where a well was always adequate, but because of a lack of precipitation, the water table was low, and some of the wells ran dry.”

The money is only available to cover emergency situations for farmers or livestock owners who suffered significant costs or losses last year because of the drought. It will pay up to 50 percent of the cost of permanent measures and 75 percent for temporary measures, such as the cost of trucking water to parched animals.

“I know that up in Canterbury, George Gilnes was hauling in 1,000 gallons a day,” said Kevin Pomeroy, co-owner of one of the region’s last dairy farms, in Mont Vernon.

The Pomeroy farm is fortunate, he said. The well it drilled in the early 1960s is still producing enough to handle scores of milking Holsteins, each of which drinks a bathtub’s worth of water daily.

In Milford, Trombly Gardens has long used the Souhegan River as irrigation, but this year’s low water levels led owner Sean Trombly to invest $25,000 in a “traveling irrigation” system as a backup, just in case.

At the Cooperative Extension, Nute said he heard of problems with some farm ponds, which are often shallow ponds dug in fields that fill from springs or seeps, used as a sort of holding tank for drinking or irrigation water.

“Some farm ponds were drained to a point where (farmers) were starting to get lots of debris in their pumps,” he said.

In those cases, emergency aid could help pay to enlarge ponds, fix pumps or even find a new water source.

The aid is available to anybody, including so-called hobby farmers, in which agriculture forms just part of a home’s annual income. This is by far the most common type of agriculture in Greater Nashua and can sell as little as $1,000 worth of produce annually to be considered a farm.

Because of the need to submit records about damage and to have suffered certain levels of damage, however, it seems unlikely that many of these so-called “mom and pop” farms will be eligible for the aid.

“I suspect this will be for the real commercial farmers in the county – maybe a dozen applications,” Nute said.

Still, the mere fact that any aid is available is significant, he said.

And no matter how bad the dry weather became, one truism of New England farming remains: They’d rather have too little water than too much any day.

“Farmers would rather have drought than too much rain, because they can irrigate, but they can’t get rid of it,” Nute said. “But this is the first time they were really scared, watching their ponds go down and down and down.”