George Foster, a third-generation farmer in Middlebury, cut corn on a neighbor’s farm on Tuesday to help feed his 950 cows after this summer’s drought shrunk his own crop.

The 2,000 tons of additional feed cost roughly $100,000, Foster said, not including the labor of harvesting the corn and trucking it home to his dairy farm. The last time the 2,300-acre farm had to buy extra feed was in 1965, Foster said.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, a national drought mapping project out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, shows that all of Vermont is in a moderate or severe drought , as of Sept. 2. For farmers, that’s making a difficult dairy business even more challenging as they’re forced to haul water and buy feed to keep the cows producing milk through the heat.

Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, the

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