Drought & Heat Hammering TX Farmers & Ranchers - Losses Could Beat Old Record Of $4.1 Billion

[hatrack]

LUBBOCK — In more than four decades of farming, South Plains cotton producer Rickey Bearden says he's never seen an early growing season like this one. In the past month, the world's largest contiguous cotton patch has endured blast furnace-like conditions as unseasonably high temperatures and strong winds have sucked moisture from soil and whipped plants with blowing sand.

All of Bearden's dryland acres are a total loss, just a month after they were planted. "I've been here a long time and I seen it blow, but not like this," he said. Across Texas, the nation's leading producer of cotton and cattle, heat and drought conditions combined with skyrocketing input costs could lead to record losses in agriculture this year.

The tally for all crops and livestock, which won't be figured until later in the growing season, could top the largest single-year loss of $4.1 billion, which was set in 2006.

EDIT

Last year, the Lubbock area did not record a 100-degree day; already this year there have been about a half-dozen days above the century mark. The only areas not feeling a lack of rain lie east of Interstate 35, which runs through the middle of the state, Miller said.

EDIT

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5841537.html

[villager]

1. damn liberals! What have they done now!?

n/t

[unpossibles]

2. well, Bush is still a more green person than Gore 'cause his house he lives in is green

doesn't matter what his actual policies are.

</sarcasm>

[kestrel91316]

3. Sad for the TX farmers, but aren't we all happy, sportsfans, that

global warming and climate change are fake?

[NNadir]

4. At least Iowa is safe from drought.

It makes me want to go out and get a flex fuel Chevy Tahoe.

[Dover]

5. It's pretty much impossible to doing ANYTHING outside during the hours of

10am - 6pm. That's one long siesta. I think it's even too hot for the grasshoppers which are plaguing all the farmers too. I can see the perfect storm building around food availability throughout the country due to one disaster or the other...not to mention the Wall Street speculators which are another kind of plague altogether.