STS BBNJ 08805 & VICINITY FORUM - - NOW 12 YEARS ONLINE 2008-2020

WARREN COUNTY — A postcard-like vista off Hope Road in Warren County shows an expansive valley lake surrounded by mountains. The long humpback of Allamuchy is off to the north and east, the three peaks of Jenny Jump hover just west. The valley is mostly known as Great Meadows, but is also called the Pequest River valley. The soil there is known as black muck; always moist, high in nutrients and good for growing.

It’s best farmland in New Jersey," says Dennis Pryslak, who owns or farms almost 2,000 acres in the valley.

The lake has no name, because there is no lake. It is flood water, six to eight feet high in some places, that has covered all that black soil and wiped out the harvest crop for Pryslak and his neighbors at Empire Farms and Liberty Sod Farms. The water came cascading down from Jenny Jump and rising from the Pequest flood plain and at one point covered about 1,800 acres of the valley.

This most recent flood began last week, when storms over this part of West Jersey added another six inches of rain on land that has tried to absorb almost three feet of rain since August 1. New Jersey’s gentle trout streams, like the Musconetcong, the Pequest and the South Branch swept away a half dozen cars in Flanders. Roads were closed from Hackettstown to Califon.

Houses with water up to windows, trees toppled from roots up, and people paddling down Main Street, are the public images of floods. In the hinterlands, an equally deep but quieter misery takes places. The land is ravaged. Soil is eroded, falling branches smash smaller trees, loose rock pummels ground plants and pools of water drown them, and farm fields are reduced to mud, or submerged. The food on those fields can’t be saved.

"We’re seeing corn flattened, and apple drop," said Lindsay Caragher, the West Jersey counties director for the United States Department of Agriculture.

"We get a variety of molds and blights and rot," she said. "Every crop has a specific problem or disease."

LINK: http://blog.nj.com/njv_mark_diionno/2011/10/di_ionno_the_best_farmland_in.html#incart_hbx