HOBE SOUND, Fla. — When Beth Leonard thinks of drought, there are a few things that come to mind.
"Fire," a manager at Hobe Sound Farmers Market said.
Overlooking the farm are acres and acres of land ripe for a lightning strike or errant cigarette butt to spark a fire.
"Scary when you have all these animals to think about," she said.
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The next words that comes to mind is a lack of food for her grazers, especially her cows.
"They eat a lot. You see how big they are. They're not tiny ... there's a lot of them," she said. "We've got a lot of babies, and this is not what we want it to look like."
Leonard said one of a cow's main food source is grass. In fact, a cow can consume about 2 percent of body weight or 24 pounds per day. But since the area has been in a drought for just over a month, grass on the farm is wilting or dead.
"The rolls that we saw when we came in, we put them out for the cows," she said. "I mean, we'll offer that all year round, but when it's going like this, it's something they have to have pretty much daily being brought out as opposed to weekly, so it's a big difference."
Leonard said she's praying for rain as costs are adding up. She's trying to stay optimistic.
"We will figure it out because that's what farms do," she said.
