Following a wet spring, several months of high temperatures with little rainfall in York County are already causing setbacks for local farmers.
The S.C. Department of Natural Resource's drought response committee voted Friday to raise the entire state's drought status one step, from normal to incipient, the level before moving to moderate, severe and extreme drought levels.
For western York County peach farmer Arthur Black, that means the need to pump water from other sources to irrigate his peaches, which isn't cheap.
"Let me put this into perspective," he said. "A gallon of gas costs $2.50, and bottled water costs 69 cents a pint -- water costs more than gas."
And the lack of rain is having an impact, Black said. "The peaches aren't sizing like they should be," he said. However, he said that the taste of his peaches has not been impacted by the dry heat.
He also has some hay crops that haven't yielded what they should. Acres that normally bring in between 90 and 100 bales of hay are now producing only 60 to 65 bales.
"The heat that we've had this year early is the worst that I've seen," said John Hicklin, a Chester County resident who has worked at the Farmers Exchange in Rock Hill for about eight years.
"Even if you water the stuff, the heat is so bad it's still taking effect," Hicklin said.
Hicklin also said the wet spring didn't really help the corn crop this year, because the corn is planted sometime after the middle of March.
"The last four weeks is when it should have been coming in real strong," he said, but without the water, the crop has been weak.
The drought has also taken its toll on cattle, drying up the pastures so much that the cattle have little to eat.
State climatologist Hope Mizzell told the Associated Press that a dry spell of several weeks has caused an increase in wildfires and taken a toll on crops.
Mizzell said the wettest winter in more than a decade left officials hoping the drought wouldn't return, but the beneficial rains mostly stopped after March.
Rusty Darby, who runs the farm F. Guy Darby and Son on Brattonsville Road on the York and Chester county line, said he will have to sell some of his beef calves early just to reduce the number of cattle feeding on the dwindling grasses.
"The wet spring did give us an abundance of grass," Darby said, "but it's drying quickly and the days are so hot."
Darby, who is also a large-scale wheat and cotton farmer, said a "timely" rain is what crops need. Over the past several months, "it was so wet it wasn't good," he said.
"We are wheat farmers, and due to wet weather we lost 50 percent of our acreage because it was too wet to plant it. That was last fall, and it stayed wet all winter and spring, and the 50 percent that we got planted, we lost about 70 percent of that," he said.
Darby then explained that the wheat that has grown has struggled. Overall, the farm produced about 7 percent of what he hoped it would yield in wheat.
Cotton, he said, isn't affected by how much it rains, only that the rain comes in a timely manner. These past few weeks, his cotton crop has "really backed up," he said.
But neighbors two miles north and two miles south "missed those itty bitty showers and their crops are hurting worse than mine," he added.
No matter what is to come, Darby said, "As a businessman and a Christian both, I pray hard."
Darby comes from a long line of family farmers dating back to 1776. It's a tradition that, despite recent setbacks, assures him that the earth will provide.
The other day he was looking at the cotton crop with his father, 81-year-old F. Guy Darby, who Rusty admires for his knowledge of farming.
"It's my daddy's 68th cotton crop," he said.
