Rainfall Totals - 2023

It's been quite a battle for the past few days and hence my "radio silence."  I developed a bad toothache.  It's the canine tooth on the front right side.  My face is swollen and am experiencing throbbing pain and although I'm taking antibiotics every 12 hours, there's no knocking this thing down.  The dentist can see me tomorrow morning at 10:15.  I am counting the hours...  But I see the light at the end of the tunnel.  We'll try our best to power through this thing.

Let's change the subject and talk about rainfall for the previous year.  We keep detailed records by day and month, showing totals.  Here is the chart for 2023:

This was quite a shocking year for us, with only 45.63 inches of total rainfall!  August, in addition to being swelteringly hot, was desert-like dry.  We recorded 0.0 inches of precipitation in August.  The biggest rainfall we got was back in January, when we gladly accepted 8.9 inches.  In a weird thing we always record, you'll see that it NEVER rained on the 18th or the 19th day of any month in 2023.

Below is a summary, by month, showing rainfall.  The year was extraordinarily dry resulting in grass that did not grow, animals in poor condition and garden yields down.

The table below shows the trendline, based on a compilation of 11 years of data collected on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  The record annual rainfall in that period was 2017, when we received 79.9 inches.  The low annual rainfall record was set this year, with only 45.36 inches.  The 11 year average rainfall was 64.03 inches.  This means this year we were about 19 inches below the average.  Yep, a dry year.

We already talked about the driest and wettest months of 2023.  For a 11 year average, however, the wettest month has been May and the driest month has been March.  Just some interesting, albeit nerdy stuff we track.  We pray that the rainfall returns back into the normal range for 2024.

2021 Rainfall - By The Numbers

I've been running a little behind in the thing we normally compile in January, and that's the accounting of rainfall totals and egg production on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm for the previous year.  Tricia and I were talking about the fact that by midnight tomorrow, 1/12th of the year is already gone.  How can that be?  2021 was a year that will be remembered for Covid lockdowns.  You know what wasn't affected by the Covid Lock-down?  Rainfall and Egg Production.  The rain kept on falling.  The hens kept on laying.

Each day we keep detailed records of rainfall, egg production, and milk production.  It's very OCD, I know, but it is interesting to see trends year over year.  Yes, it can be a pain and very tedious doing this, but it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble (for the most part).  I follow a blogger from Florida that blogs about composting and gardening tips.  He and his family WEIGH all the produce he produces in his garden and posts the total each year.  It is in the thousands of pounds.  Maybe we'll do that?  Maybe not.

Let's take a look at total rainfall by month for 2021:

You'll note that we accumulated 66.6 inches of rainfall in 2021.  That was up 6.64 inches over last year.  The month with the most inches of rainfall was May.  The lowest was November.  The wettest and driest months of the year were totally different from last year as well as they were January and March, respectively.

As I look over the monthly rain logs, I see that it did not rain on the 30th day of any month in 2021.  Interesting.  We'll plan our picnics on the 30th in 2022.  January is already keeping the streak alive.  It did not rain today.

Now let's take a look at our compilation of 9 years worth of rainfall data:

You'll note that over 9 years, we are averaging 66.91 inches of rainfall or 5.58 feet of rainfall per year.  In 2021, we nailed the average.  On average, in our 9 year data collection period, the month of May is the wettest and the driest is November.  In 9 years, we've collected 602 inches of rainfall or 50 feet of rain.  At Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we wish you showers of blessing in 2022!

2019 Rainfall By the Numbers

Each year we track certain things like rainfall.  In early January we sum up the totals and calculate rainfall here at our little family farm.  We have a rain gauge out by the garden right next to the cow's water trough.  Every day after a rain I dump the water out and record the precipitation on a paper log in the utility room.

Here are the statistics from 2019.  As you can tell, March was the month in 2019 that had the least amount of rainfall with 1.1 inches and May was the month in 2019 with the most rainfall at 12.05 inches.  For the year we had a total of 64.6 inches of rain.  If you do a search to see the average rainfall in our zip code, it shows 60.35 inches.  We are once again over the average rainfall for 2019.

Why do we do this?  I guess curiosity.  But I also like to see trends.  We began tracking rain back in 2013, so we have seven years of data.  From this data we gather some neat information.

First, our average rainfall at our farm is almost 68 inches or 5.66 feet over the past seven years.  The highest rainfall totals were from back in 2017 with 79.9 inches and the lowest in 2012 with 58.15 inches.  It is kind of neat to see that over the last seven years, we have gotten right at 40 feet of rainfall.  That's a lot of water!

In 2019, the month with the lowest rainfall was March at 1.1 inches in total and the highest was May with 12.05 inches in total.  Over the last seven years, the driest month has been March, averaging 3.03 inches, and the wettest has been August, averaging 9.67 inches of rainfall.  Torrential rains in August 2016 leaving almost 26 inches of rain on the ground, skews the data though.

One other thing to see that was interesting is that there were three days of the month FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR that it never rained.  It never rained a drop on the first day of every month, the 9th day and the 11th day.  Meaningless information, I know, but it is fun to track and see. 

We're already tracking rainfall for 2020 and on the 23rd day of the month, we've already surpassed every year except 2013 in rainfall total and still have a week to go!

2018 Egg Production - By the Numbers

In installment two of our 2018 "By the Numbers," we'll look today at the tally of egg production over the past year.  One of Benjamin's chores is to collect eggs, clean the ones that require tidying up, packaging them into cartons, counting them and notating the number of egg production each day on a spreadsheet we have posted on the refrigerator.  We record daily production, subtotaled by month and summed by year.  The summary of egg production for 2018 is listed below:

In 2018 we picked up 11,573 eggs and that equates to 964.42 dozen.  That's a lot of omelets!  We have roughly 100 hens.  I say roughly because, those girls don't stay still long enough to count.  Two years ago we fed them in the barn and trapped them in there.  One by one we let them out and counted them.  There were a few more that 100, and we've lost some since then.

On average a bird lays 116 eggs per year.  We picked up on average 31 eggs per day, meaning that a hen lays an egg about every 3 days. Below is a 5 year historical trend on monthly egg production:

The first thing that stands out is egg production is WAY up.  With fewer hens in 2018, we picked up 1,823 more eggs than in 2017.  What do we attribute that to?  Nutrition.  During the springtime, the hens find nutrition out in the pasture.  A change we made in 2018 was to begin supplementing the rough and milled rice we feed them with a little bit of laying pellets to add some protein to their diet.
The results were startling.  You'll notice that in 6 of the 12 months of the year, production was up month over month.  Most of the gains in production took place in January and February.  Overall April is the biggest month of production.  Spring grass and nutrition is at its peak and the weather is perfect without any stresses on the birds.  January is the lowest production month of the year due to short days and little nutrition on the pasture.

What do we do with all those eggs, you might be wondering?  Well, we eat a bunch of them.  Of those we don't eat, we give away about half of them and sell the remainder. 

Millennial Migration

I was at a conference this past week in Orlando, Florida.  It had nothing to do with agriculture, actually the discussion was about trends in home buying, but since farming is one of my passions, I view many things through the lens of agriculture. I share with you one of the slides that caught my attention:

Image Credit

Although the above photo that I took with my phone by be unclear, the trend is crystal clear that young people (24-34 year olds) are increasingly attracted to urban living according to census data from 2010. Here's a quote from the source data:

The Takeaway: More Young Adult Urban Growth is Coming
The number of 25- to 34-year-olds—the key group driving urban living—will not decline, but will grow between now and 2024. The urban wave we’ve experienced starting in the 1990s, and accelerating in the past decade, wasn’t propelled by generational growth so much as by a growing preference for urban living by young adults. The shift of young adults to cities, drawn by urban amenities, is increasingly confirmed by academic researchers, and is borne out by the latest Census data.

I really like country living.  I like the slower pace, the simplicity, the elbow room, the wide open spaces.  We live close enough to the city to enjoy shopping, dining, and cultural events, if we wish, but rural living is attractive to us.  To each his own, I guess.

The takeaway that I get from the millennial migration is concerning to me in more ways than one.  I think as more and more young people flock to urban centers, our rural areas are increasingly left vacated by the young as they move off to seek opportunity and adventure.  As this occurs, fewer jobs and opportunity are left in small towns and on family farms.  "Water tower" towns with boarded up Main Street buildings and aging populations and few entertainment venues aren't attractive to the younger generations.  This is not a new occurrence, but Census data shows the frequency of the migration is increasing.  Will the last one leaving town please turn out the lights?

THIS LINK lists some leading factors that pull people to cities and similarly push them out of rural locales:

Pull factors

• more and better jobs
• better hospitals and health care
• better living standards
• cities are social and financial centres
• better education—schools and universities

Push factors

• too many people in the countryside
• low income
• not enough raw materials (water, wood etc..)
• the quality of farming land is getting worse

We are losing our connection to the land.  More and more people are becoming dependent upon fewer and fewer people to grow their food.  Something as simple as a natural disaster that would disrupt our supply chain, could turn urban centers to chaos or societal collapse as grocery store shelves empty.  Food and water shortages in high population density centers with people unable to feed themselves seem to be the theme of many apocalyptic books and movies, but it is not too far-fetched, if you think about it, especially considering the trend discussed above.

What can we do to stem the tide?  How can we maintain the fertile fabric of rural America?  By addressing the issues highlighted in the bullet points.

Support local business in your communities.  That is a starter.  Spend less at the big box store and more at the Mom & Pop shop.

Encourage young people.  Support your local 4-H club and FFA chapter.

Grow your own food OR support your local farmer's market.  Share your garden produce with your neighbor and build close relationships in your very own "Mayberry."

None of these is a magic bullet or miracle cure.  Perhaps nostalgia, or other reasons of necessity will reverse the migration.  Until then, I will remain in my garden as the sun goes down each day, eating crisp banana peppers right off the plant without washing them (gasp!) and breathing in fresh country air and enjoying the simplicity of pastoral living.  I might even drink water straight from the garden hose (Oh, the humanity!).

“An economy genuinely local and neighborly

offers to localities a measure of security

that they cannot derive from a national or a

global economy controlled by people who, by

principle, have no local commitment.”

—WENDELL BERRY