Fourth of July isn't the only holiday this dry weather is threatening. Without much rain in the forecast Christmas trees are also taking a big hit.
"Dry weather and farming is a hard way to do it," said Ed Carpenter at Peacock Road Farm.
There isn't much Carpenter can do except watch all of his hard work slowly die. He planted 4,000 new trees this year and has already lost about half of them.
"It's a disaster for us," he added.
Carpenter is still doing everything he can to save his trees, even if it's a long shot.
"We're hand watering them trying to keep the ones we've got left alive," Carpenter said.
It might be because weather like this brings back memories of the drought that wiped out Peacock Road Farm his first year in business.
"I almost quit raising trees," Carpenter recalled.
Over at Tannenbaum Farms in Mason things aren't looking much better. Owner Mel Koelling is bringing in an irrigation system, something most tree farms don't need.
"I'm sick," Koelling said. "We are watering almost 24 hours a day. We do not have as large a capacity unit as we require because we never anticipated having to water like this. We've been growing trees almost 40 years and this is the first time we ever had to water trees of this size."
He says the newer trees are usually the first to go, but he's not used to seeing his established trees start to show signs of damage. Koelling's hoping by watering those older trees he can save them, but he says that is only buying time since the trees need at least a couple inches of rain. He's ever more concerned since those are the trees that would be ready for sale in a few years.
But with an unpredictable forecast the best thing both farmers can do is take it one day at a time.
"That's what farming is about," Carpenter said. "You have your good years and you have your bad years and we'd like to say every year is going to be good but it doesn't work out that way very often."
