Posted on 11/22/2012 4:25:58 PM PST by familyop
Not good.
Texas needs Biblical rain. It’s beyond desperate. :(
God - "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain...if My people will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways ....I will... heal their land."
Easy solution really...
I moved from West Texas to Central Texas 12 years ago hoping I would actually see more rain.
The first year was like 50 inches. After that, every year it got worse and worse and then it went down to nothing. Lake Travis is so low that artifacts are being found where water used to be.
It’s bad. Really bad.
Just saw the Ken Burn’s special on the Dust Bowl. Total propaganda that humans caused all of it. Fits right in with the environazis/Globull Warming religion.
Yes—propaganda. I’ve lived and done agricultural work around both forested areas and other places surrounded by natural prairie. After about the second year of severe drought, natural prairie roots shrivel and break off easily, regardless of depth. Natural prairie will blow away.
I’m not knocking soil conservation through crop rotation, leaving bands of perennials/trees here and there, terracing (illegal in my State due to water rights regulations), and so on. Those are smart practices that will hold moisture, hold top soil, and buffer against shorter droughts. But yes, I’ve seen the false blame from environmentalists on mechanized equipment, human presence, etc. People, doing small agriculture properly, can actually better preserve land and animals against diseases and other natural disasters.
The drought that we’re seeing now, BTW, is more geographically extensive than the dust bowl drought (up to 6,000 feet elevation back then). Now, it’s sweeping over the top of the Great Divide.
My guess is that without enough precipitation during the months to come to stop it, we’ll start seeing dust storms next summer. Saw much more dust in the atmosphere than usual at over 9,000 feet last summer. There’s nearly no visible snow-pack on the peaks now—only thin streaks here and there.
Another two years, and we’ll see the kinds of storms seen during the Dust Bowl era if not sooner. The most severe part of the Dust Bowl drought lasted for about 7 years or more—closer to 8 or 9 years for the whole drought.
Have fun. Enjoy the slide. No doubt, millions have been praying for it and giving thanks.
Dry as a bone here between Houston and College Station. I was grading some out by the barn and it is just stirring dust. Ground is parched. We have nothing but forest sand and iron ore though and it never does hold moisture.
Either the well is going dry or sanding up because the pump seems to be cavitating.
Supposedly we had “normal” rain here this year but you can’t prove it by me. This month is like October and November 2010. We had the fires the next year.
Pastures at the farm in E. Central Oklahoma are just dust and much bare. We used to have long lingering wet periods in the fall. Not now.
All we can do is pray and suffer and commiserate I suppose. It is bad though and has gone on for almost the last 5 years it seems. Pretty much abnormal in that period so far as I can see.
After leaving Midland, Texas years ago I said I would never complain about rain and I have stuck to my pledge.
Yup. The forbs are deteriorating and breaking off as you state. We have not yet seen plain devastation but we are seeing so many trees die that I wonder what will be left if this persists.
Strangely, south of 290 and back to the south of I-10 but east of the Colorado River here in Texas people cut hay up to 5 times this last summer so there are pockets that are just a little odd.
In Oklahoma we got one cut in the spring. Some tried to cut late fall before frost but it wasn’t worth the diesel. South Central Oklahoma near McAlester but north of Durant made a good second cutting but that was all I saw. The Ouchitas are dry as toast. I saw a guy trying to drill winger pasture in McCurtain County and I don’t think he was much more than scratching the ground. Everybody is trying to drill something in and you can’t find a 10 to 12 foot pasture or no-till drill anywhere around. They sell in less than a week if someone has one.
We tried to plant some rye in 2007 in October. Got a little mist the night after we planted it and no more moisture until spring. Needless to say, nothing came up. We got flooding rains last fall and spring. We have a spring that was reliable back in the 20s and 30s. I cleaned it out with the trackhoe to 10’ deep a couple of years ago. The ground was downright saturated and I felt luck to get out of the area. Now the spring is dry to the bottom. It has been unseasonal for a long time.
Dust storms are part of a natural cycle on the Plains. Major Stephen Long's expedition in 1821 recorded the events and even led to the area being labeled the Great American Desert. We had a relatively small one a few weeks ago that closed I35 in Oklahoma for a few hours. I think it is going to get much worse. Just hold on to your hat!
I don’t know what to tell you and hope that you get through it. I’m on very high elevation dry land, and the drought will take even the extremely short, tough perennials up here before next summer without the usual spraying ice. Was going to start yaks next spring (even started the slightly higher fencing for those), but holding off is probably a better way to go for now. Only a little over 12 inches of precipitation per year during wetter years (thus, yaks for year-round ranching).
A couple more years to go before the probable effects of solar max during extra fluctuations (north magnetic pole still off near Russia, last I looked—can cause unusual storms but temporary desertification, too) maybe caused by an extended minimum (also includes fluctuation toward warm and dry, sometimes). If we’re blessed, we’ll see increasingly colder but wetter weather after that—maybe in 3 years or so.
Dry land cattle business is shut down from the plains to the higher large mountain basins (seasonal at high elevations, cattle moved to lower elevations during winter). If adequate precipitation (snow pack on peaks, spring snows, etc.) doesn’t happen by May, some wet land operations will start shutting down, too.
Queue up famous climate scientist Algore & his glow-bull warming BS as the culprit in 3, 2, 1...
The dust bowl of the 30s was caused by several years of below temperature norms in the Pacific.
Right on the mark.
Government is here to help everyone. Sometime after Wounded Knee, the government issued a cow and a horse to the Sioux Indians on the reservation. By WW1 these people were well on their way to making their living as cowboys. With the high price of wheat, the Indians sold their cattle and rented out the land to wheat farmers. The bottom dropped out of the wheat market and the Indians were without income from growing wheat and had no more cattle to roam on the range and provide them a livelihood.
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