Prevailing dry weather has hit the island’s farms, and cornfields are among crops bearing the brunt of it.

The Bermuda Weather Service said this week that the long-range forecast hinted at rain later this month but it was still too early to say when or how much.

JaVaughn Dill, of Dill Pickle Farming, said conditions at his cornfields were “unusually dry”.

He added that he was forced to uproot sunburnt stalks last month as birds were beginning to eat the grain.

Mr Dill said: “At the moment it is super hot, and when it gets so hot, the birds attack the corn; they eat them out.”

Unlike some crops that are irrigated by drip lines, he said his cornfields relied on “open weather” for water.

Mr Dill added: “This is the worst weather I have seen with corn, because I would usually have corn for Cup Match.

“This year I didn’t have any in the lead-up to the holiday”.

He said that “corn is a very vigorous crop to grow and at the moment it’s tough” on the plant.

The farmer added: “We haven’t had a week or two where we had good rains.”

Mr Dill said his watermelon crops also suffered as a result of the dry spell.

“The heat is so intense all my local watermelon is finished, so it was a very short season,” he said.

Mr Dill was watching the weather and said that if conditions improve, he may plant a crop later this month or in early September.

If all goes well, he added, the crop should be ready for harvest in November.

Mr Dill was also monitoring the hurricane season “because that can be the biggest factor on all the farmers’ plans”.

Tom Wadson, of Wadson’s Farm, noted: “It is very abysmal at the moment.”

He said he planted some corn indoors, but added: “I have bags of seeds just waiting for the weather to improve.”

The Southampton farmer said in his 50 years of tilling the soil, “I have never seen anything quite like this”.

Based on information he received from a weather source, he said “there may be some rains next week but that doesn’t mean it would be enough”.

He added: “There is not much we can do because it is that time of the year when it is really dry.”

Mr Wadson said: “It is very challenging but we just have to wait and see.”

At Amaral Farms, Carlos Amaral said he stopped planting corn a few days before Cup Match.

If he had continued planting, he said, “the birds will just go to town on the crop because they are looking for that moisture” within.

“We deemed it too risky,” Mr Amaral added.

He said: “We’re in a holding pattern right now; we’re just watching the weather.”

Mr Amaral said his banana and watermelon crops were fighting the conditions but his pumpkins were struggling.

The Devonshire farmer recalled that 2023 was “totally different”.

He said: “It was amazing last year; we had good weather, but we just can’t control it.”

Michelle Pitcher, the director of the Bermuda Weather Service, said: “There are hints in the long-range computer forecast models that in the next two weeks we will start to see the Bermuda-Azores high weaken and that will increase the likelihood of rain.”

She added: “How much and when is still too early to predict with any confidence.”

Ms Pitcher said: “We can only rely on our climatological averages. Note that the wetter months of the year tend to be October and January and the drier months of the year tend to be April and May.”

She said that in most months, the island typically recorded an average of four to five inches of precipitation.

Ms Pitcher said usually at this time of year “we are dry due to the positioning of the Bermuda-Azores high overhead”.

She added: “High pressure promotes sunnier and drier conditions.”

Ms Pitcher explained that the pressure system “steers any tropical cyclones closer to the Caribbean and/or the US East Coast, away from Bermuda”.

Starting this month, she said “the Bermuda-Azores begins to weaken and is centred closer to the Azores, than Bermuda”.

This movement, she added “allows low-pressure systems coming off the US East Coast to enter our area”.

It also allows the paths of tropical cyclones to track near or over Bermuda as they arrive from the south-east through south-west.

Ms Pitcher said last summer was unusually wet “so that can also alter the perception of this summer being very dry”.