Fri., August 31, 2012 1:00pm (EDT)

Farmers Use YouTube To Share Devastating Impacts Of Drought

By Eliza Barclay

Updated: 9 months ago

As we told you last week, farmers are using Twitter more than ever to keep tabs on each other and, this summer, to commiserate over their drought-afflicted crops.

It should then come as no surprise that plenty of farmers are also active on YouTube, and disseminating intimate views of what's happening in farm country. Which is handy for those of us in big cities, struggling to wrap our heads around the drawn-out absence of rain in the Midwest.

Of course there are the now world-famous Peterson Brothers of Kansas, whose June video "I'm Farming and I Grow It" was a runaway sensation, with almost 7 million pageviews.

But farmers elsewhere are touching on more serious themes what the drought looks like, and how it's impacting their livelihoods.

Take a young farmer, who goes by Jack Squat Digger, who posted footage of his cornfields and pasture in east central Indiana. In a July video, he describes his cornfields as "waist-high, tossled, rolled-up, pathetic, bad-looking."

But Jack acknowledges he's better off than others. "I'm going to get a little out of the field better than a lot of guys are going to get," he says. An update in mid-August shows that his corn has matured some, but isn't nearly what he'd hoped or expected.

KatzCradle, another active YouTube user, has made videos using still images of her community in Missouri, which she says she was inspired to share after seeing similar images from another farmer in Iowa.

She reports in a dispatch on August 19 that it's so quiet around her home because the corn driers aren't running there's no corn for them to dry. Her own crop of corn is so poor, she says, most of it is just going to have to be plowed under.

She's also alarmed that many of the shelves in her local grocery store are empty and that a local restaurant has had to close.

"The crisis of the drought and rising food prices are not just something I read about in the news," says Kat. "They have come to my town and are impacting my life even as I make this video."


Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.