The US Department of Agriculture says an early summer heat wave across the West has increased demand for water to save dry crops. But in many areas, water supplies are limited, with water being needed to fight wildfires in western states like California, Nevada and Washington.

Temperatures have reached about thirty-eight degrees Celsius recently in parts of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, several degrees above average.

The northern part of Alabama is described as the driest in about one hundred years, while in southern Alabama and northern Tennessee, farmers also suffered through a dry period last year.

Federal officials have declared all counties in Alabama a drought disaster area, meaning that farmers can receive low-cost emergency loans, but they are also asking Congress for an additional $17 million dollars in aid.

But drought is not the only weather problem right now for American horticulture. Recently, too much rain fell for some crops in the southeastern Plains. To the east, rains of twenty-five centimeters or more in areas struck the western Gulf of Mexico, where waters washed out fields and flooded lowlands.

But farmers welcomed heavy rainfall in early July from the Mississippi River Delta to the southern Atlantic coastal area. Summer crops in the Midwest have been mainly free of the drought suffered in other areas this summer.