A severe drought in the Southwest is devastating crops and farm communities—and sending a warning about climate change.
Photo Credit: vesilvio/ Shutterstock.com
July 22, 2013
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Ed
Moore’s ranch sits on the flatlands of the Texas panhandle, east of
Lubbock, just outside the tiny town of Ralls. On a clear day, you can
see for miles in any direction. Most days, however, the dust blows—and
when it does, the sky becomes a dull orange haze and the scene becomes
impressionistic. The high gray towers of grain elevators dot the
landscape. Cattle graze in silhouette. Farmers ride through the gloom on
tractors with vast “sand fighters” that gather the earth into big clods
so the soil won’t blow away. It’s daytime, yet it’s dark—not as black
as it gets during the worst of the dust storms, like those that tore
through southeastern Colorado in the spring and the ones that swept
across Phoenix a few years ago, and maybe not as bleak as the
land-destroying Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, but nevertheless eerily
subdued. Something clearly isn’t right.
In a typical year, the
winds ease up in mid-spring, and the dust tamps down. In the past three
years, however, as the rains have failed and the land has dried up, the
winds have continued into the searingly hot summers. As they blow, the
soil disintegrates, and what little moisture there is in the earth
evaporates. The soil quality is now so poor that on the few occasions
when it does rain, the next day’s wind simply blows the newly moistened
topsoil away. Across the area you can see rows of cotton, black and dead
in the orange earth—entire fields burned by the static electricity
generated by the sandstorms.
Locals have started calling the storms by their Arabic name,
haboobs—presumably a nomenclature brought back by returning Iraq War veterans. Lately the
haboobs have
been visiting themselves on the High Plains with a depressing
regularity. They are no longer considered an episodic menace but rather a
fixture of the landscape, the calling card of an emerging
climatological crisis.
Moore, who was born in a farmhouse on his
family’s land just north of Ralls, is 73 years old. His balding head is
deeply tanned, his forearms mottled by the sun and wind. When he was a
young man, he got an aeronautical engineering degree and headed to
Seattle to work for Boeing. In 1971, however, his heart called him back
to West Texas. It was, after all, the land to which his mother and her
family had trekked in a covered wagon in the 1920s. Moore recalled being
told that his mother, at age 5, had walked alongside the wagon all the
way from Comanche, Texas, 250 miles away. They were lured to the region
by the promise of cheap, fertile land—the promise that drew so many to
the High Plains during the boom years that preceded the catastrophic
onset of the Dust Bowl.
“This land, I love it,” says the old
farmer softly, his eyes staring far off in the distance. “It means
essentially the world to me. I want to make sure I take care of it and
make sure my sons can have it. The only thing we worry about is the
water supply.”
Last summer, the water table in Moore’s area
dropped by about a foot. The White River Reservoir, which supplies water
to four towns in the area, is at its lowest point since it was built in
the 1960s, Moore says. About ten feet at its deepest, “it’s just
pollywog water.” His two wells, which used to pump up to 500 gallons per
minute, are putting out only about 150 gallons per minute.
Like the
haboobs,
water scarcity here is starting to seem like something other than a
passing concern. It’s a troubling sign of a long-term trend, a problem
exacerbated by drought but more complex than annual precipitation. After
decades of overuse—tapping into aquifers and removing more water than
nature could add back in, even during the abnormally wet 1980s and
’90s—the water-credit system in this part of the country seems to be
running out. “We’ve used much more water in the last couple years than
we normally would because of the drought,” explains Robert Hagevoort, a
dairy specialist at New Mexico State University’s agricultural science
center. Water tables have dropped quickly, he says, and as a result
irrigated agriculture is under severe threat.
Moore largely uses
dryland farming techniques, since there isn’t enough water to irrigate
his fields. If it rains, he can grow crops and keep cattle. If it
doesn’t, he can’t. “I like a challenge,” he explains. “Every day is
different. That’s what farming is. Do we plant cotton? Do we plant milo?
Do we fight sand? When do we quit it all and get on a horse and ride?”
The
question is not merely rhetorical. As Moore and his neighbors confront
the grim possibility that this year’s rains will again fall far short of
the twenty-five inches he says are necessary, with dwindling
underground reserves to draw from, they are simply facing the facts. “We
hope the rains start up again,” he says. If they don’t, “these little
towns will disappear.”
A similar lament can be heard across the
Southwest, in bone-dry communities in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and
Kansas. Thanks to record drought and heat, Arizona and Colorado have
been plagued by fierce forest fires in recent months—nineteen elite
forest firefighters died in an Arizona blaze in late June. And it’s not
just rural areas under threat; cities are also at risk. Las Cruces, New
Mexico, has to drill wells 1,000 feet deep to extract water. Smaller
municipalities like Magdalena, south of Albuquerque, are trucking it
in.
What we’re seeing in these regions is a harbinger. Around the
world, as climate change accelerates and population growth bumps up
against natural limits, water access is becoming increasingly
important—and increasingly precarious. The economic impact is immediate
and severe.
“Right now, there ain’t anything underneath that dry
land,” says Johnny Shepard, who manages a cotton gin near Lubbock. In
2011, the drought was so extreme that 60 percent of the state’s cotton
crop was lost, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA). The
numbers have improved since then, but only marginally. More than 40
percent of the Texas cotton crop was lost in 2012, and given current
conditions, the losses are likely to be similar this year. Nationally,
cotton production declined from 18 million bales in 2010 to 17 million
in 2012—with much of that drop in the Southwest.
As hay and
alfalfa prices skyrocket in response to the drought, farmers are selling
off animals they can no longer afford to feed. The cattle herd in Texas
is down by more than 1 million. Nationally, the figure has declined
from more than 98 million head a few years ago to about 89 million. The
tight supply sets up the prospect that consumers will pay far more for
beef in the years to come. In eastern New Mexico and the Texas
panhandle, about 20 percent of the dairies have gone belly up for
similar reasons. Milk production costs have risen 50 percent in recent
years, a portion of which has been passed on to consumers.
Last
year the corn crop was about 25 percent shy of its potential. After
years of heady expansion (fueled in part by the introduction of
genetically modified crops), US corn production has dropped to its 2000
level, according to the USDA. The production of many strains of wheat
has also declined since 2011, largely because of crop failures in the
High Plains, and soy production in 2012 was nearly 10 percent down from
its 2010 level.
These days, much of the nation’s corn crop is
being used not for food but for ethanol fuel. Not coincidentally, as
competition for the produce has increased since 2008, corn prices have
jacked up sharply. This has led to rising food prices and, as important,
put a strain on exports—which has ricochet effects, especially in
poorer communities around the world.
Because US food production
anchors the international food system, a drop in exports leads to price
inflation in countries where poorer populations spend a larger
percentage of their income on staples. Markets overseas have also been
hit by US drought–induced shipping disruptions. Sixty percent of all
grain exported through the Gulf of Mexico is shipped to ports via the
Mississippi River. But for a few weeks late last year, the river levels
around Thebes, Illinois, fell so low that barges filled with grain
destined for export had to lighten their loads. Much of the $7 billion
in commodities that the American Waterways Operators and the Waterways
Council estimate normally travel down the Mississippi in December and
January either backed up or had to be transported by more expensive
methods.
* * *
American agriculture is
extraordinarily resilient, engineered to withstand regional droughts and
even prolonged national weather crises. Even so, farmers who must adapt
need time to familiarize themselves with new crops, and scientists need
time to learn what grows best during years of extreme water scarcity.
But with weather patterns shifting more rapidly and water resources
drying up, time isn’t on their side.
There is no consensus on how
much of today’s drought in the Southwest can be attributed to climate
change. But there’s little doubt among climatologists that a warming
planet is at least partly to blame. The journal
Nature Climate Change has
published studies suggesting that the United States is likely in for a
series of severe droughts over the next thirty years. In 2010 Climate
Central chief climatologist Heidi Cullen explained that “the weather of
the future is going to be more extreme. That means more extreme heat,
extreme storms, extreme drought.” When a drought devastated Russian
agricultural production that year, European researchers concluded that
human activity–induced climate change had made it three times more
likely to occur. An EU commission also predicted that severe heat waves
of the sort that hit much of Europe in the summer of 2003 could become a
biannual occurrence by 2040.
According to USDA meteorologist Brad
Rippey, the lack of snow and rain in 2012 was caused by a confluence of
factors, including, in 2010 and 2011, back-to-back Las Niñas, a North
Atlantic high-pressure system that blocked moisture from the eastern
half of the country, and a Pacific oscillation resulting in a drier
West—as well as the broader changes produced by global climate change.
By the end of 2012, the USDA had declared 2,245 counties (representing
71 percent of the country’s landmass) disaster areas because of drought.
No other year in history has come close to having so many
USDA-designated disaster areas. Although the drought broke in much of
the country last spring, those conditions still hold across the
Southwest.
“The water supply conditions we have right now are by
far the worst we’ve had in the last hundred years,” explains New Mexico
State University professor of civil engineering Phil King. In a normal
year, the Rio Grande Project releases 790,000 acre-feet of water to
farmers and rural communities. In 1964, until now the worst year for
releases from the project, only 206,000 acre-feet were released. This
year, says King, only 163,000 acre-feet are likely to be released,
making it the worst year on record for local farmers. “We just had the
river dry for eight months,” he adds. “Next year it could be dry ten
months.”
The drought has led to increasingly bitter legal
squabbles over water rights. Each state designs its own water-access
rules, so the feds can do little more than sit back and watch as the
battles intensify. In New Mexico, the districts within the Rio Grande
Project have been fighting over how much water should be allocated to
farmers in each area. Texas has gotten into legal tiffs with New Mexico
and Oklahoma over water access. And an increasing number of lawsuits are
being filed between farmers competing for limited access to rivers.
Long
term, there’s a strong prospect for broader social disruption brought
on by resource scarcity. What scares King and other hydrologists is that
the Southwest is becoming the epicenter of several overlapping crises.
Rapid climate change is occurring amid a huge population shift.
Agriculture (which in a state like New Mexico has traditionally
accounted for more than three-quarters of all water use) is competing
with oil, gas and other industries for increasingly scarce water. And
all players, whether small-town water districts or state governments,
cities booming on oil revenues or rural hamlets struggling simply to
stay alive, are jostling for access to aquifers that aren’t generating
anywhere near the amount of water they used to.
During the big
storms, the farmers wage a Sisyphean fight against the sand. When the
sand isn’t blowing so hard, many tally up the fields they’ve lost and
file crop insurance claims. Fourth-generation Texas farmer Ray Johnston
simply decamps to one of his favorite sports bars on the outskirts of
Lubbock, where he drinks Coors Light and ponders his situation.
“It’s
kinda depressing,” says Johnston, who lost his crop last year to
drought and planted 500 acres of cotton again this year, only to watch
as eighty-five-mile-per-hour winds brought in a June hailstorm that
destroyed his crop. “You sit out here and do all this hard work, and
you’ve nothing to show for it.” In the past three years, the amount of
land Johnston has been able to farm has declined from 1,200 acres to
about 600. He spends between $10,000 and $15,000 per month to irrigate
the half that’s left.
The luckier farmers, Ed Moore among them,
are surviving in relatively decent financial condition because there are
oil derricks on their land that pump up and down nonstop, indifferent
to the dust storms. But even those sitting on oil are increasingly
reliant on payouts from their crop insurance simply to cover basic
operating costs. And water has to be pumped in to keep the pressure of
the oil wells constant. In many parts of the country, including Texas
and New Mexico, the introduction of water-intensive fracking techniques
has worsened this problem. Entire towns are springing up overnight to
cater to the oil and natural gas boom. In these areas, population growth
and the rise of heavy industry are dramatically increasing pressure on
already strained agricultural water supplies.
Hundreds of miles
southwest of Ralls, on an alfalfa and small-grains farm near Roswell,
New Mexico, Craig Ogden is facing a similar set of challenges—and a
similar risk of heartbreak. The 55-year-old relies on irrigation from
the Carlsbad Irrigation District to water his 800 acres. But the water
allotments are pitifully small. In the past few years, he has been able
to grow on only about 10 percent of his acreage.
“We had eighteen
months of no rainfall,” says Ogden, whose curly gray hair, ready smile
and blue eyes make him look startlingly like the actor Gene Wilder. “We
sold a lot of equipment last year. When you’ve had people who have
worked for you, it’s hard to let them go.” As he considers what will
happen to his family if his farm fails, he starts to cry. “I’ve got
college degrees, but with my age it’s going to be hard to find something
in this job market.”
Ogden’s friend Matt Rush is also struggling
to make ends meet. He recently took a job with the New Mexico Farm and
Livestock Bureau in Albuquerque, four hours from home. He, too, cries as
he considers his prospects. “This is who we are,” he says. “When your
livelihood becomes your identity, you can’t just stop.” He pauses, tries
to talk himself into optimism. “It’ll take a while to get her Sunday
clothes on,” he says, referring to the land. “But she’ll look good. It’s
so wide open. You can see the sun coming up and the sun going down. You
can see every star in the heavens at night. When it’s green, it just
feels so alive to me. When it rains, you can see it in everybody’s
faces—how relieved they are. Contributions go up in church on a Sunday
after it rains.”
* * *
Eddie Speer homesteads
a small farm outside Lubbock. His wells have almost run dry; his wife,
Laura, worries that she might not have enough water for cooking, washing
the dishes and bathing. “We wake up every morning, and if we didn’t
know God was taking care of us, we couldn’t get through the day,” he
says. “We pray for rain—in church and privately. We ask God to bring
rain and bless our farms.”
Speer walks me down his rows of
dead crops, showing me the texture of the soil. It’s dry, as fine as the
red desert sand in Utah’s Arches National Park. “That won’t grow a
seed,” he says resignedly. To make it through the year, Speer has had to
sell off his cattle and file a crop insurance claim. He pays more than
$30,000 per year to insure his crop. But he can’t leave his land. It’s
his home. It’s where his grandfather died, of a massive heart attack,
and where his father died.
Thanks to the national crop insurance
system, which grew out of the wreckage of the Dust Bowl and the Great
Depression, farmers can buy insurance worth up to 75 percent of the
value of their crop, averaged over a set number of years. They buy it
from private companies, but those companies are guaranteed by the
government, which covers more than 60 percent of the cost. Like all
insurance programs, it works as long as it isn’t chronically overused.
Right now, it’s being used as never before.
Congress has an
opportunity to address this crisis through the farm bill, which is
currently the topic of robust debate in Washington. On July 11, with
help from the powerful agribusiness lobby, the House passed legislation
giving large farms the ability to buy “shallow loss insurance,” which
would guarantee up to 90 percent of their income—thus providing a
perverse incentive for agribusiness to try to cultivate land manifestly
unsuited to the crops in question. The House also set up new profit
insurance systems for large-scale dairies. But it provided
no funding
stream for the federal food stamps program. To appease right-wing
conservatives, nutritional assistance—a central pillar of previous farm
bills, which remains at the heart of the proposed Senate bill—was
stripped out.
The White House has promised to veto the bill. But
the proposal to expand short-term subsidies to agribusiness on the backs
of tens of millions of food stamp recipients reveals a fundamental
problem with US agriculture. The current model relies on two sets of
subsidies: to farmers during years when crops fail, so that they have an
incentive to produce enough food even when it’s not profitable; and to
the tens of millions of Americans who otherwise could not afford to feed
themselves. Take either of these props away, and producers as well as
consumers get hurt.
Even if funding for food stamps is ultimately
approved, the crop insurance model may be in jeopardy. As droughts
become longer and more severe, and as the agribusiness lobby skews
policies even further in favor of big combines, the program could become
unaffordable to small-scale farmers like Moore and Johnston—and
unsustainable for the government.
By the end of spring, 597
counties had been declared disaster areas, which qualifies them for
low-interest federal loans and other financial assistance. US Drought
Monitor maps show most of the center and west of the country in moderate
to extreme drought conditions. The rains have returned to the eastern
and northern regions; the Mississippi River flooded in the late spring,
and in San Antonio, so much rain fell in May that it, too, was
inundated. But in the West and Southwest, the drought is getting worse,
and too often the remaining water is getting saltier and thus less
suitable for growing many kinds of crops.
At the moment, farmers
are surviving on grittiness, technological creativity and crop
insurance. But the payouts are subject to a law of diminishing returns:
each year’s payout is based on the average value of the previous ten
years’ crops. Meanwhile, because insurance companies are disbursing
record amounts to farmers, premiums are going up. It’s not uncommon to
hear stories of farmers receiving $150,000 in payouts only to return
more than $30,000 in premium payments. That makes sense for large
agribusiness enterprises concerned with protecting revenues rather than
protecting fields, but it’s a heavy burden for small farmers. And while
agribusiness has the means to pay for supplemental coverage options that
protect up to 90 percent of the value of its crops, such options are
beyond the means of men like Eddie Speer.
* * *
The
effects of this transformation go far beyond the farms and ranches. In
January, Cargill announced it was closing a huge beef-processing plant
in Plainview, Texas, because so few cattle remained in the area. With
only two weeks’ notice, about 2,300 workers lost their livelihoods.
Overnight, Hale County’s unemployment rate spiked from about 6 percent
to nearly 13 percent. Texas A&M’s Agrilife Extension Service
estimated that the loss of jobs at Cargill, combined with secondary
effects as related businesses suffered and residents bought less in
local stores, would cost the county more than $97 million.
Many of
the unemployed workers—who used to earn good wages and enjoy strong
union benefits in a largely nonunion, low-wage state—now make a daily
trek to the Workforce Solutions office, in a run-down strip mall on the
edge of town, to look for jobs. Others have turned to service sector
jobs at Walmart and other superstores. “It was a big old shock,” says
Rachel, a young woman standing with friends in front of Workforce
Solutions. Rachel used to work for a sanitation company that was brought
in every evening to clean the slaughterhouse. “It was the end—the end
of life in Plainview as we know it. A lot of people left, a lot weren’t
able to leave because of family. When God said in the Bible we need to
live day to day—boy, He wasn’t kidding.”
Just like in the days of
the Dust Bowl, a way of life is under threat here, as are the
livelihoods of millions of people. If the weather chaos of the past few
years becomes a new norm, the stability of the US and global food
systems could come under threat—tightening supplies, increasing prices
and pushing the Eddie Speers of the world into uncertain futures
separated from the land they love.
I want Speer’s prayers to be
answered. But I fear that Ed Moore might be more realistic. Moore looks
over the land on which he rides his 15-year-old Appaloosa, Lady, at the
end of each workday. You can almost see the sigh forming in his chest.
“I don’t think we’ll ever run out of water [entirely]. But it’ll get so
expensive we’ll have to quit,” he says. He stops to gather his thoughts.
“You ask about this land. I don’t have a clue why I love it. It’s flat.
Very hard to make a living. If I were really smart, I’d go somewhere
where the average rainfall is forty inches. But this is home. And I
don’t like to fail.”
Sasha Abramsky, a Nation contributing writer, is the author of several books, including, most recently, Inside Obama’s Brain, Breadline USA and American Furies. His next book, The American Way of Poverty, will be published by Nation Books in the fall
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