As farmers and homeowners in most of Pennsylvania deal with a lack of rain, Lancaster County has come through the summer months relatively unscathed.

State officials Monday declared a drought watch for most of Pennsylvania, with the exception of nine counties in the southeast region, including Lancaster.

Jeff Graybill, an agronomist with the Penn State Cooperative Extension of Lancaster County, said crop yields in the county are on pace for an average growing season.

Graybill, who primarily works with corn, soybean and tobacco crops, said he has seen some evidence of dry weather while driving around parts of Lancaster. He said a swath of farmland from north of Ephrata to Elizabethtown has seen less rain, and the crops there have suffered.

He also said isolated areas in the Conestoga and Holtwood area have received less rain, affecting the crops.

"Some pockets in the county have been hit hard," Graybill said. "The yields there will be significantly below average, but not disastrous."

The vegetable yield in Lancaster is on pace to be average, Graybill said, because most of those crops are grown using irrigation.

The main bulk of the sweet corn crop has passed, and the harvest for other corn will begin within a couple of weeks.

Graybill said it has been an unusual summer in terms of rainfall because there have been very few days of extended storms. He said the county has mostly seen hit-and-miss thunderstorms.

The isolated thunderstorms can cause great disparities between localized rainfall, Graybill said, and he has seen significant differences in the size of the crops on farms that are only a mile or two away from one another.

Millersville University meteorologist Eric Horst said the county has been lucky this summer with rainfall amounts compared to other parts of the state.

Horst said there have been extended periods of a week or two with a lack of rain, but he said those weeks have been followed by heavy showers.

The state Department of Environmental Protection said many counties are more than 4 inches below normal. The Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center said Clinton, Union, Schuylkill and McKean counties are at least 5.5 inches below average over the last 90 days.

Horst said the county has received 22.5 inches of rain so far this year, compared to the average of 25 inches. He said being behind by 2 to 3 inches at this time of year is not a serious situation.

He said in the drought years of 2002 and 2003, Lancaster County was as much as 50 percent below normal rainfall amounts.

Some parts of the county are not under any drought conditions, Horst said, after they received 4 to 5 inches of rain during last week's storms. Other parts of the county received 2 to 3 inches.

"How a given county gets doused or missed by rain depends a lot on luck," Horst said.

A drought watch is the first of Pennsylvania's drought classifications. There is no mandatory curbing of water usage, but consists of a voluntary 5 percent reduction.

A drought warning calls for a voluntary 10 percent reduction, and a drought emergency mandates a 15 percent water-use reduction.

Horst said a drought watch is determined by rainfall amounts, river and stream flows and well-water levels. He said the Conestoga River is in its normal range of water flow for the season.

A drought watch is not a dire situation, Horst said, and the state usually goes into a watch every two to three years.

"If the dryness goes into the fall, some counties could have a problem," Horst said. "The good news for Lancaster is we're not in that boat yet."

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