Search:

The Associated Press

LA PRYOR, Texas—Hal Jessee looks at a shovelful of dirt and assesses it as only a lifelong farmer can.

“It’s not looking good,” says Jessee, 83, who farms 400 acres about 100 miles southwest of San Antonio. “If you go down, you get dry dirt. ... It should be wet all the way down.”

With his land consumed by drought, Jessee probably isn’t going to plant milo on three-quarters of his farm acreage this year. As a dry land farmer, he relies on rainfall to keep the ground moist enough to support his crops.

Jessee said the .7 inches of rain he got earlier this month was the first measurable moisture in six months. For farmers in a large swath of land west and south of San Antonio, the downpours of last summer that in some cases threatened to ruin crops have all but disappeared, leaving them to make hard decisions about whether to plant and hope for rain or cut their losses now.

Last July, the state was declared drought-free for the first time in at least a decade. No more.

Gene Corrigan, who lives not more than a few miles up the road from Jessee, got a full inch of rain earlier this month. He’s taking the gamble and planting at least 200 acres of milo—out of 600 acres he farms.

Except for east Texas, the state ranges from “abnormally dry” to some level of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Much of Zavala County, where Jessee and Corrigan live, is in an extreme drought—the second-worst category. All or pieces of 10 other nearby counties, including the one home to the border city of Eagle Pass and those referred to as Texas’ “wintergarden” region, are also reporting extreme drought.

“In this case it was weird because 2007 started out great as far as rainfall. We were on pace to have the wettest year in Texas on record for the state as a whole” until rainfall dropped off around September, said Texas State Climatologist and Texas A&M University professor John Nielsen-Gammon. “If it were evenly distributed through the year we’d be fine but it wasn’t. Unfortunately, Texas weather has this nasty habit of alternating between too much rain and too little rain.”

The state averaged about 37 inches of rain for 2007, nearly 10 inches above normal, said Victor Murphy, of the National Weather Service Southern Region Headquarters. It was the seventh wettest year on record going back to 1895.

Without a natural source of water, growers will run irrigation systems and pumps overtime, a move that will increase their energy costs and eventually draw down reservoirs replenished by last year’s rain.

The drought also is creating wildfire dangers across the state. According to A&M’s Texas Forest Service, more than 160 counties have burn bans.