The drought is impacting melon farmers as well. Water isn't as much of an issue down in Muscatine, they tend to irrigate, but the problem is the heat. It's causing this year's melon crop to come in too fast."
"Everything south of us sounds like it's gone, the lower end of Minnesota they're coming on heavy too," says melon farmer George Taylor.
He's raised melons for 40 summers. And a says hot one is perfect. But this year just keeps stepping on the gas.
"We're at least two weeks if not a little more ahead of schedule."
Taylor's crews typically harvest between 600 and 800 cantaloupes a day. They're been up to one thousand this year. And the watermelons are coming in fast too. Putting the farm on a schedule it can't maintain.
"We're getting everything out and by the end of August, which is when we start thinking about ending, we're going to be done," says Taylor.
Squishing the season puts a glut of melons at farm stands. And Bookkeeper Linda Taylor says that pinches their pockets.
"The supply is more than the demand is, so the cost of the cantaloupe and watermelons, the price is reduced quite drastically," says Linda Taylor.
In just a week, the farm has had to cut it's price on cantaloupes from two dollars to one. A fifty percent decrease. They had their suspicions about this year.
"We thought it was because it was an early spring, we didn't really have a spring, it went from winter to summer almost," says Linda.
But nothing like this.
"I never have to go to a place to gamble because I can do it right out here," says George.
