Jeremy Mayne turned off the spigot midmorning Monday that controls the hoses inside a plastic-walled structure that house plants teeming with bright red strawberries. Up until this week, the water that dripped from the irrigation lines that stretch across much of the 15-acre Mayneland Farm had been the only source of moisture to nourish the vegetables and berries he grows to sell at the on-site farm stand at the southeast corner of Bauer Road and Mill Street in Naperville. Although his farm received nine-tenths of an inch of rain this week as of Friday morning, Mayne said he could use 5 inches more.
Jeremy Mayne stands inside a high tunnel that protects the tomato plants he's growing on his Mayneland Farm in Naperville. The lack of rain this summer has forced him to use city water to irrigate his plants, he said. “I worry about the weather all the time. It’s very frustrating because farmers have no control over the weather,” the 77-year-old said. “This is one of the worst droughts because we haven’t had a decent rain I think in two months.”
Although it looks like a greenhouse, Mayne said the difference is that high tunnels are wrapped with one layer of plastic whereas greenhouses are covered with two plastic layers that allow air to flow between. Without a decent rain in two months, Mayne has been forced to tap Naperville water more frequently this spring to irrigate his fields. “I only have a 2-inch pipe coming in, so we only can water about one quarter to a third of the fields and high tunnels at one time,” Mayne said.
Irrigating is generally done for a couple of hours per section on Mondays and Fridays, he said, and it takes six to eight hours to get the entire farm sufficiently watered. With temperatures in the upper 80s recently, water evaporates more quickly from the ground as well as from the leaves meaning more water is necessary. In these high tunnels, his crew was watering “for an hour to an hour and a half,” he said. The lack of rain is not the only weather-related element Mayne had to contend with this spring. Frost warnings at the beginning of May put his strawberries at risk.
Mayne said he has no plans to put the farm on the market. “If I were to sell the farm, I’m concerned about how to invest the proceeds of a sale. Money can quickly disappear but my land, real property, does not and always will be here when I wake up the next morning,” he said. “I’m going to keep farming, not only because I love it but because I don’t want to sell,” he said.
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