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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

To say Texas is big is an understatement.  I don't know how far Beeville is 
from Sage or any other Texan we might have on the list, but I thought the 
article might be interesting to some.  There is a slideshoe and a good photo 
of an older Texas cowboy/farmer at the link.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

     
 

Beeville Journal

Texas Ranchers and Farmers Struggle in Drought 

 Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Austin Brown II, 65, on his ranch in Beeville, Tex. Much of the state has not 
had a significant rainfall since August. More Photos > 




By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: February 11, 2009 
BEEVILLE, Tex. — Austin Brown II kicked the sandy dirt near a feedlot with 
his spurred boot and surveyed the land his family has ranched for three 
generations.


Drought at the Brown Ranch Most years the first green shoots of spring and 
pink bursts of paintbrush flowers would be rising from the soil by now. 
Nothing meets his eye but brown grass, dried up oaks and dust billowing in 
the wind.

“You can see how the sand is just drifting,” said Mr. Brown, 65, digging his 
toe into the dust piled up at his feet. “This normally would be grass.”

The worst drought in nearly 100 years is racking three-quarters of Texas. 
Much of the state has not had a significant rainfall since August. Winter 
wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily 
on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder 
if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil 
is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting. 

“The last time we had a drought this bad was in January 1918,” said John 
Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist. “The droughts in the 1950s in 
individual years were not as bad as this.” Mr. Nielsen-Gammon, a professor at 
Texas A&M, said the weather had been unusually dry for the last year and a 
half, but since August, much of the central part of the state — a broad swath 
from just south of Dallas, through Austin and San Antonio and down to Corpus 
Christi — had gotten little or no rain. Even last year’s hurricanes, Dolly 
and Ike, did not help, he said.

Though about a half-inch of rain fell in Austin and Dallas this week, it was 
not enough to offset the 20-inch deficit in rainfall over the last 18 months, 
he said.

A weather pattern over the Pacific known as La Niña has pushed the jet stream 
north, keeping the normal fall and winter rains away, meteorologists say. In 
the last three months, only about a quarter of the usual rain and snow has 
fallen across the state.

“We are dry from the Rio Grande Valley through the High Plains — there is no 
subsoil moisture,” said Travis Miller, head of soil and crop sciences at the 
Texas AgriLife Extension Program. “I really don’t think anybody’s going to 
plant until we get significant moisture.”

The time for planting corn and sorghum is passing fast. In central Texas, 
farmers plant corn from mid-February to late March, hoping to harvest it 
before the intense summer heat in August. Sorghum is planted a bit later, in 
late April. The last option is cotton, which can be planted as late as May. 

Archie Abrameit, the manager of the Stiles Farm Foundation, a state-owned 
farm of 2,900 acres near Thrall, said the parched soil thwarted the winter 
wheat from coming up. Farmers have no hope that the spring crops will do 
better, since not even wild plants are sprouting. 

“We make the joke we can’t even grow weeds this winter,” Mr. Abrameit said.

As a result, farmers have found themselves playing a guessing game. Does one 
plant corn now and hope for rain, or wait for rain, hoping it comes in time 
to plant sorghum? Or wait still later and plant cotton, which can be grown 
until later in the summer? Some admit privately that they will plant knowing 
the crop will fail in hopes of collecting insurance. Others say they may not 
plant at all.

“The clock is ticking as far as coming up to planting time,” said Terrell 
Hamann, who farms 1,800 acres near Taylor, just northeast of Austin. “I 
change my mind about three times a day about what to do.”

Complicating the calculus for farmers and ranchers, prices for grain and beef 
have dropped, as people across the country have cut their spending in the 
economic crisis. 

At the Brown Ranch in Beeville, about 85 miles southeast of San Antonio, the 
family is bracing for what could be a terrible year. So far, Mr. Brown and 
his son, Austin Brown III, have kept their 2,000 head of Angus, Hereford and 
Akaushi cattle watered by pumping well water into troughs, at great cost in 
electric bills. They have also dipped into the ranch’s savings to buy 
hundreds of bales of hay and hundreds of pounds cottonseed “cake,” dense 
protein-rich pellets, to feed the animals. 

As the younger Mr. Brown spread the cottonseed cake on the ground on a recent 
afternoon, a hungry mob of Hereford cows chased after his truck, jostling and 
bumping one another. The ground was devoid of green life as far as the eye 
could see. The cows and their calves had devoured a towering roll of hay left 
for them but could find nothing to forage.

“When the grass is real green and lush and they have a lot to eat, they won’t 
hardly come to you,” the younger Mr. Brown said.

A point comes when the cost of feeding the cattle in a drought becomes so 
high it makes no sense to continue, the elder Mr. Brown said. Then all or 
part of the main herd of reproductive cows and bulls must be slaughtered. It 
is a prospect every rancher fears, for that core herd is what produces a 
yearly bounty of calves to be raised and fattened for the market.

“We are going to try to keep these cattle going into June,” the elder Mr. 
Brown said, “and if we don’t get any rain by June, then it’s all over and we 
will have to send them to 



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/us/12drought.html