Lack of Rain Dries Up Fields and Dreams in the Texas Panhandle

There’s no use searching the sky anymore. If there is a hopeful cloud, it disappears into the pale blue emptiness, delivering nothing but disappointment.

After nine months without substantial rainfall, beyond a brief, teasing splatter here and there, the farmers and ranchers of West Texas have retreated into a stiff-lipped resolve. Someday, surely, it will rain bountifully again, reviving wheat fields and dead, brown pasture that can no longer feed the cattle, and turning around this continuing nightmare that old-timers are beginning to liken to the Dust Bowl disasters of the 1930s--when bankers came calling with sad news, and family farms and ranches began to collapse.

“It’s the driest I’ve ever seen it,” said Brooks Gunter, 48, who has spent his entire life working these high, yellow plains in the Texas Panhandle. “Even if we had a big ol’ heavy rain right now, it’d be like pouring water on a handful of baby powder--it’d just sit there and run off. We need a bunch of slow, soft ones.

“Of course, every time I pray for rain,” he said with a short laugh, “I’m afraid the Lord will give me what I deserve, not what I want.”

It is hard to find anyone who feels that they deserve the latest card dealt by Mother Nature in this often weather-torn, always weather-ruled, land. Because of the drought, the constant windstorms carry an extra wallop, clearing the land of the tender young wheat plants, sweeping away $25,000 from a single field in a single afternoon blow. Stunted cattle pastures have forced ranchers to buy expensive, supplemental feed for their livestock, and auctioneers predict that the growers will soon have to sell off their cattle at rock-bottom prices.

And now, here it is spring again, and time to plant crops that, given the current conditions, will only wither and die in the ground.

Nearly all of Texas has suffered a dry spell to some extent in the last six months, but for nearly two years, West Texas has been beset by a devastating lack of rain. Arizona and New Mexico also are uncommonly dry, meteorologists said, and Kansas farmers are worried that there won’t be enough rain to nourish their crops.

In Oklahoma, which recorded its driest February since 1892, Gov. Frank A. Keating announced that he will ask the state Legislature to approve a special expenditure of $120,000 to finance a cloud-seeding program to trick the skies into possibly giving up some rain.

In a sign of the desperate conditions here, 130 Texas counties recently applied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for emergency cattle-feed subsidies, by far the largest number ever recorded, USDA officials said. To qualify, county agriculture officials must certify that at least 40% of the pastures are too parched for grazing; in turn, the ranchers can be reimbursed for up to 50% of the money that they are forced to spend on protein supplements and other feeds.

“Pretty much everybody is hurting,” said Michael Flynn, senior meteorologist with the Southwest Agricultural Weather Service Center in College Station, who added that long-term weather forecasts offer little relief. “If things don’t pick up, the dry-land farmers won’t have any moisture to plant, and those with irrigation are going to have too much cost involved. It’s either going to be very, very expensive or very, very bad news.”

Of course, residents of the semiarid plains of West Texas are accustomed to never-enough rain. The average in a good year is about 15 to 20 inches. But in Armstrong County, where the county seat of Claude has 1,200 people, only 0.2 of an inch of rain has been recorded in 1996, said county agriculture agent Steve Young. The last good soaking rainstorm came in June 1995. And in some places, the land is so parched that three-inch-wide cracks have opened up. To make matters worse, only a dusting of snow fell here this winter, at a time when the land could have used the six to eight inches that normally fall.

“In a farming community, a ranching community, everybody’s dependent on the agriculture--the equipment dealers, the stores, everybody,” said Bruce Ferguson, head of the federal Farm Service Agency in Claude. “Everybody’s talking about it. Nobody knows how they’re going to be able to make it. They’ve got money borrowed at the bank, and a lot say they can’t repay without a crop. Then the cattle prices are low, with the feed costs for those cattle so high. Usually, an 800-pound animal would bring 78 to 80 cents per pound, and it’s running 60 to 65 cents per pound right now, if that.”

As John Ballard, 54, drives over his property, pointing out the cows that aren’t gaining weight and the wheat fields that aren’t producing, he too is wondering how long he can endure.

“See how short that grass is?” he said, indicating a flat expanse of brown stubble. “You don’t see many cattle around. They’re picking on it. That’s about it. They’re not happy campers.

“See where that dirt has sifted right out of that field?” he said, pointing to a ditch filled in with dry soil. “That wheat won’t do anything. The only alternative is to plow it up.” Another withering field. “See that wheat there? It’s dead. It’s brown. It’s had it.”

No one has to remind the Ballards and the Gunters about those discouraging facts. Lifelong neighbors and friends, they have weathered many an inconvenient blizzard or ill-timed cloudburst, but never have they felt so helpless in the face of that big, relentless, clear sky.

With the hardy makeup of dry-land ranchers, they are worried, but in a quiet, stoic way. There is nothing they can do to make it rain, although some are joking that hiring an old-fashioned rainmaker is becoming an appealing option.

“It’s a full-time job to stay optimistic,” Brooks Gunter said. “Maybe we’re not living right.”

If matters don’t improve, Ballard said, he expects to make less than a tenth of his normal crop.

Unable to do much else, he has been busy planting a shelter belt--”my little part in getting the ozone replenished”--neat rows of 300 cedars, red oaks and Austrian pine that he hopes someday will block the winds from blowing the seeds out of that portion of the ground. The young trees, of course, will have to be watered religiously if they are to take root and thrive.

“You get grouchy. You sure do,” Ballard said. “Because you know the banks are petrified right now, in general. They’re afraid the equity’s going to be lost. Bankers tend to be your friends in good times, then they forget you in the bad times.

“Right now,” he said, “you want to be a Rip Van Winkle and hibernate till this is over.”

For James Gunter, Brooks’ father, the blank skies bring to mind his boyhood, the five straight years during the Depression when the winds blew and it rained dust instead of moisture. He remembers an Easter Sunday, 1934 or 1935, when “a big ol’ wall of dust” came barreling into Claude, “looking like the end of the world.”

“I’ve been telling these young ones, they’ve had 20 years of good, see. We used to have something like this every 10 years. It was overdue,” said Gunter, 73. “I’ve been telling them this would be tough.”

Still, no one could help noting the one hopeful sign on this recent afternoon. The wind was blowing from the southeast--the moisture direction. Maybe something would develop over the next day or two. Otherwise, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.