(Bloomberg) -- It’s barely September, but crops are withering and brown leaves carpet the ground. Forests are bursting into flames. An iconic river is, in some places, little more than a mud-choked stream.

This isn’t the US West, where a historic megadrought is threatening supplies of food, drinking water and hydropower. It’s the Northeast — a region where, for most people, the parched conditions are more nuisance than crisis. But for farmers from New York to Maine, the dry weather has been nothing short of disastrous, and rainfall this week provided little relief. 

In Rhode Island, the drought’s impact on some crops could last well into next year, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Management. In Massachusetts, the drought in late August was the most severe for that time of year in US government data going back to 2000. 

The Northeast’s plight is the latest example of the ways climate change is wreaking havoc on weather trends around the world, upending seasonal patterns that farmers have depended on for generations. While it doesn’t compare to the devastating water shortages plaguing the West, the drought poses a threat to the region’s hay, corn and dairy industries, and it’s turbocharging the risk of wildfires.

In Rhode Island, farmers who can typically harvest hay three times in a season are expected to do so only once this year. Because each harvest varies in quality and size, that means losing about half the value of the entire crop, estimated Henry Wright, who grows about 300 acres (121 hectares) of hay and corn. 

The fields are in such poor condition that as the season winds down, Wright is unlikely to be able reseed in the fall. He’ll have to wait until next year, shortening the growing season. He expects the 2023 hay crop to be only 10% to 20% of normal. 

“It’s just not going to happen,” said Wright, who’s also president of the Rhode Island Farm Bureau. “This is really a desperate time.”

In parts of Massachusetts in late August, the Charles River, which runs along Harvard University’s campus and is the site of a world-renowned annual rowing competition, shrank to a trickle. Near the Cochrane Dam on the border of the towns of Needham and Dover, the river mainly became a series of disconnected puddles and pools. 

In Rhode Island, “we had fairly normal rainfall through June, then it just dropped off the edge of a table,” said Ken Ayars, chief of the agriculture and forest environment division at the state Department of Environmental Management.

At the family-owned Ronnybrook dairy farm in New York’s Hudson Valley, corn stalks that should be six or seven feet tall (2 meters) are standing at only two feet, and many lack ears. Co-owner Rick Osofsky expects to harvest less than half the corn that was planted and about half the hay. The crops are used to feed their 300 cows, and now he’ll have to spend extra money on additional feed for the herd. 

The drought is also affecting the quality of the feed that’s available, which will impact how much milk the cows produce. And because cows don’t sweat, they don’t do well in the heat, which can further affect their milk supply. Osofsky expects the herd’s output to be down about a fifth this year, shaving 20% off his annual profit of $300,000 to $400,000. And that’s excluding the additional expense of buying feed. 

“The whole dairy game is milk,” Osofsky said. “It’s making as much milk as we can as cheaply as we can. So this has made it terribly expensive to do.”

Read More: Sky-high feed prices are pushing small farms out of the business

The weather culprit is a high-pressure system that’s been parked atop the region, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the US Department of Agriculture. That can block cold fronts coming from Canada and the central US, or storms coming up from the South. All of that means less moisture for the Northeast. 

More than 86% of Massachusetts is in severe to extreme drought, according to the US Drought Monitor, along with 65% of Rhode Island and 46% of Connecticut. Portions of New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont are in severe drought. The National Interagency Fire Center sees an unusually high risk of significant wildfires in the Northeast this month.

The drought is hitting drinking-water supplies, but the impact varies significantly across the region, according to Samantha Borisoff, a climatologist with the Northeast Regional Climate Center. Some communities are restricting water use because their wells, which are typically fed by groundwater and streams, are drying up. But bigger reservoirs like the Quabbin, which serves Boston and is 90% full, have been less affected.

Some relief came from a deluge that hit the Northeast on Tuesday, but drought conditions persist. Sometimes the ground can get so hard from prolonged dry weather that the water just runs off, said Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster for the US Weather Prediction Center.

While it’s tough to link any specific weather event to climate change, it’s clear that longstanding seasonal patterns are being disrupted, said Mark Richardson, director of horticulture at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill. In recent years, there have been seasons with far more rain than usual and years without enough. 

“We don’t have normal, average conditions any longer,” said Richardson. “The trends have been toward chaos.”

Trees have deep, extensive root systems that can better tap groundwater, and have been less affected by the drought. But they’re still showing signs of distress across the region. Leaves are falling off early, and some are starting to change color earlier than usual. 

However, the drought may not have much impact on the annual pilgrimage to see New England’s stunning fall foliage. The dry conditions are worse closer to the Atlantic coast, while many of the best areas for seeing blazing red, orange and yellow leaves are further up in northern New England. 

“There will still be plenty of good leaf-peeping opportunities,” said USDA’s Rippey.

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