N. Texas On Track To Lose Three Straight Crops As Drought Intensifies

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Stan Bevers, management economist and extension professor with Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Vernon, said lack of rainfall coupled with days and days of triple-digit heat have taken its toll on area fields. "One of the things that makes it most difficult in this area is that we will traditionally not lose three crops back to back," he said. "Now we're set up to lose three — the wheat crop last year, this year's cotton crop, and then this fall's wheat crop. That is just financially devastating."

Bevers said the area's cotton crop, even crops in irrigated fields, has greatly suffered from the dry conditions. "Cotton loves the heat, but it can only take so much without moisture," he said. "If you get out in the fields, from what I understand, farmers are finding one to two bolls per plant, so that wouldn't cover the cost of stripping it or picking it." Some local alfalfa farmers have even turned off their irrigation systems completely because keeping up with triple-digit heat was futile, he said.

"At the temps we've had, the moisture just doesn't stay. You can't get behind on irrigation, you have to just keep pumping. The problem is that some of the wells are getting low and running out of irrigation water now," Bevers said. "Some of the alfalfa growers around here just quit watering it. They couldn't keep up with the 110-, 112-degree heat."

It would take extraordinary rainfall in the next few weeks to create conditions conducive to a fall wheat crop, he said. "Can we get a wheat crop? I hate to say this because I've got friends down in Brownsville and Corpus (Christi), but we need a Category 4 or 5 hurricane to hit to give us enough moisture. That's the amount of water we'd need to even think about a wheat crop," Bevers said. "The drought has depleted all the soil moisture, probably down 3 feet. There's nothing there. These popcorn showers we've been getting recently make us feel better, but they aren't enough to change where we are."

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http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2011/aug/23/north-texas-crops-wilt-amid-drought/