Farmers Feel Dust Bowl Deja Vu Drought Wilts Crops From South Texas To Kansas

From South Texas to Kansas, one of the worst droughts of the 20th century is wilting both the crops and spirits of farmers across the nation’s midsection.

Experts say the dryness rivals that of the 1930s Dust Bowl in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Farmers and ranchers face crop failures and financial ruin. And the effects aren’t confined to the countryside, either. Shoppers around the country could see higher prices for such items as milk, bread and eventually meat.

Texas officials said the drought is the state’s second-worst natural disaster economically, behind the $3 billion damage done by Hurricane Alicia in 1983. It already has cost farmers and ranchers $2.4 billion, and related industries stand to lose $4.1 billion, Agriculture Commissioner Rick Perry said.

And the always-dry summer months still lie ahead.

“Every region in the state of Texas is either in incipient or extreme drought,” said Zerle Carpenter, director of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. “The economic impact is great.”

The Texas wheat crop is ruined, with the lowest yields since 1978, the corn is struggling and the cotton is so poor that Texas could lose its spot as the nation’s No. 1 cotton grower. Parched pastures, combined with soaring feed costs, are forcing ranchers to sell calves earlier and at lower prices.

Since 1939, rainfall totals for October through May have been recorded at an agricultural research station near Amarillo. The worst on record was 3.03 inches in 1945-46. So far, this year’s total is 2.04 inches.

Western Oklahoma is having one of the driest springs since 1895. Winter wheat that should be waist-high barely reaches the top of a farmer’s boots.

And drought-stunted pasture in the Oklahoma Panhandle is forcing ranchers to take the last-resort measure of selling off their breeding stock, said Betty Skaggs, an owner of the Beaver City Stock Yards in Beaver, Okla.

“If we don’t get any rain soon, we’re going to be out of grass by midsummer,” Skaggs said. “It’s not a pretty picture this year.”

Wheat farmers are even worse off, she said: “They’re done. It’s total disaster, even if we got rain now.”

Oklahoma Agriculture Commissioner Dennis Howard said as many as 10,000 of the state’s 70,000 farmers could lose their farms. The state predicts crop and cattle losses of as much as $1.2 billion.

In Kansas, where the five-year average wheat harvest of 367 million bushels a year usually makes it the nation’s leader, officials predict a crop half that size. At current prices, that’s a $1.1 billion blow.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week established a task force on drought.