My goodness, this summer has been hot! I know that us farmers are bad about complaining of  the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter, but when you have to endure these conditions all day, it wears on your patience. I know that those of you who work outside are in agreeance with me, but I am going to backup my hypothesis with some data anyhow.

We are blessed to have the Owen County WKU MESONET weather station on our farm. This allows us to have very accurate data for our exact location.

According to the MESONET data, the true summer heat began on June 16 with the heat index reaching 93 degrees. That was followed by a heat wave that lasted from June 22-27, when the heat index was above 102 degrees every day. After that, the remaining days of June all experienced heat indices above 90 degrees.

July did not offer any relief from the baking temps as the month had 19 days that experienced heat indexes above 95 degrees. In fact, there were only three days all month that were below 90. There is no denying that the hottest stretch of summer so far occurred July 24-30. These seven consecutive days all had heat indexes above 100 degrees with the max reaching 106! The only saving grace to the whole thing is that we have received 5 inches of rain in the month of July, which has kept it from turning brown and us being in a drought.
​
August gave us a brief break on the first weekend, but temps have quickly returned to normal since then. We are currently in another seven day stretch of heat indexes over 90 degrees, and we are not even two weeks into the month. But it is August, and they don’t call it the dog days of summer for nothing…