The wind in West Texas is famously powerful and incessant.Nike shox nz shoes are popular for the added bonus of fresh new colors and textures. But more big blows than anyone can remember have roared through this year, stripping away precious topsoil and carrying off another season of hope for farmers and ranchers.
Everywhere, it seems, the land is on the move: sand building up in corners of the just-swept front porch and coating clean laundry on the line, dust up your nose and in crevices of farm machinery. Drive along unpaved county roads and the farmers' plight becomes clear: Wind rakes the surface, scouring sand into adjacent fields, sweeping into deeply tilled furrows.
These clogged fields are said to be "blown out," and some belong to Matt Farmer. He grows cotton and peanuts, or would like to, but the sand,Thousands of discount ed hardy shoes styles for selection. he says, keeps "ooching and ooching" into his fields. In a normal year, his wheat crop would be about knee high. This is not a normal year; the anemic stalks barely rise above the heel of Farmer's dusty boots.
That's bad news for a cotton crop, which must be planted in furrows between wheat stalks, which shield young plants from wind-driven sand that abrades and slices growing things.
"It's as dry as I've ever seen it in my lifetime," said Farmer, 51. "I don't remember a drought this widespread. I've got a lot of country that's blowing, but I can't do a thing about it."
In coming weeks, when he and his neighbors begin to plow thousands of acres of dry ground, "this whole country is going to be blowed away," Farmer said.
The "new normal"
The wind, the dust and the hair-crackling dryness are ubiquitous reminders of persistent drought gripping the Great Basin,wholesale ed hardy clothing and wholesale urban wear apparel for all major brand names. a broad dry swath tracing much the same outline as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It's part of the "new normal" that climate scientists talk about: the climate of extremes.
April was such a month, with tornadoes wheeling across seven states, monumental flooding of the Mississippi River through the Midwest and the South and a searing drought in parts of the western plains.
" 'Global weirding' is the best way to describe what we are seeing," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. "... What's happening is our rainfall patterns are shifting. In some places it means more heavy rainfall, in some places it means more drought, in some places it means both."
The Oklahoma Panhandle is enduring its longest drought on record. Some communities have not had rain in eight months. Crops wither. The Department of Agriculture last month declared 39 Kansas counties federal disaster areas.
Texas is especially hard-hit. More than 82 percent of the state is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought. Three-quarters of the wheat crop has been rated as poor or very poor.
Wildfires — some 9,000 — have scorched more than 2 million acres, including 313,00 acres of grassland. Texas ranchers, the nation's top cattle producers, have no natural grass to feed their animals. Some are down to a few weeks' supply of water in stock ponds.
It used to be said that rain would follow the plow, but that's never been true. West Texas farmers always have had a rough go of it in this arid tableland midway between Midland and Lubbock. Cotton growers raise crops with either costly irrigation or the dryland method: Plant and pray for rain. Either way, it's never easy.
Drought has pared the farming community in Lamesa from 1,200 families to about 250 over the decades. "Farming is the worst way in the world to make a living, but it's the best way in the world to raise a family," Farmer said.Looking for Juicy couture wholesale? "But you better like the way dirt smells."
The ferocious wind that Farmer calls "a heehaw son of a gun" affects public safety, too, halting air and highway traffic.we sale the ed hardy Shirt in low price but with high quality. So worrisome are dust storms that NASA uses a satellite to map and predict their direction, duration and intensity, giving public-health officials 48-hour notice of serious events.
Health challenges
The fine-as-cornstarch dust has caused an uptick in respiratory distress, asthma attacks and more severe allergies, according to the Texas climatologist's office.
But Dawson County farmers don't lie down before the wind. They scheme against it. No one plants east-west rows, lest prevailing west winds destroy a week's work in an afternoon. They contour-plow to blunt the wind and to conserve water. The practice of planting cover crops is an outgrowth of the Dust Bowl, when wind took empty, fallow fields.
Fewer farmers are walking off the land today than during the Dust Bowl. Men like Farmer are determined not to let that happen.
"You hope God gives you the strength to get over the drought," he said, tugging his white straw cowboy hat lower over his forehead. "If I fail, I've let my father and my father-in-law down. They all made it."
Everywhere, it seems, the land is on the move: sand building up in corners of the just-swept front porch and coating clean laundry on the line, dust up your nose and in crevices of farm machinery. Drive along unpaved county roads and the farmers' plight becomes clear: Wind rakes the surface, scouring sand into adjacent fields, sweeping into deeply tilled furrows.
These clogged fields are said to be "blown out," and some belong to Matt Farmer. He grows cotton and peanuts, or would like to, but the sand,Thousands of discount ed hardy shoes styles for selection. he says, keeps "ooching and ooching" into his fields. In a normal year, his wheat crop would be about knee high. This is not a normal year; the anemic stalks barely rise above the heel of Farmer's dusty boots.
That's bad news for a cotton crop, which must be planted in furrows between wheat stalks, which shield young plants from wind-driven sand that abrades and slices growing things.
"It's as dry as I've ever seen it in my lifetime," said Farmer, 51. "I don't remember a drought this widespread. I've got a lot of country that's blowing, but I can't do a thing about it."
In coming weeks, when he and his neighbors begin to plow thousands of acres of dry ground, "this whole country is going to be blowed away," Farmer said.
The "new normal"
The wind, the dust and the hair-crackling dryness are ubiquitous reminders of persistent drought gripping the Great Basin,wholesale ed hardy clothing and wholesale urban wear apparel for all major brand names. a broad dry swath tracing much the same outline as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It's part of the "new normal" that climate scientists talk about: the climate of extremes.
April was such a month, with tornadoes wheeling across seven states, monumental flooding of the Mississippi River through the Midwest and the South and a searing drought in parts of the western plains.
" 'Global weirding' is the best way to describe what we are seeing," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. "... What's happening is our rainfall patterns are shifting. In some places it means more heavy rainfall, in some places it means more drought, in some places it means both."
The Oklahoma Panhandle is enduring its longest drought on record. Some communities have not had rain in eight months. Crops wither. The Department of Agriculture last month declared 39 Kansas counties federal disaster areas.
Texas is especially hard-hit. More than 82 percent of the state is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought. Three-quarters of the wheat crop has been rated as poor or very poor.
Wildfires — some 9,000 — have scorched more than 2 million acres, including 313,00 acres of grassland. Texas ranchers, the nation's top cattle producers, have no natural grass to feed their animals. Some are down to a few weeks' supply of water in stock ponds.
It used to be said that rain would follow the plow, but that's never been true. West Texas farmers always have had a rough go of it in this arid tableland midway between Midland and Lubbock. Cotton growers raise crops with either costly irrigation or the dryland method: Plant and pray for rain. Either way, it's never easy.
Drought has pared the farming community in Lamesa from 1,200 families to about 250 over the decades. "Farming is the worst way in the world to make a living, but it's the best way in the world to raise a family," Farmer said.Looking for Juicy couture wholesale? "But you better like the way dirt smells."
The ferocious wind that Farmer calls "a heehaw son of a gun" affects public safety, too, halting air and highway traffic.we sale the ed hardy Shirt in low price but with high quality. So worrisome are dust storms that NASA uses a satellite to map and predict their direction, duration and intensity, giving public-health officials 48-hour notice of serious events.
Health challenges
The fine-as-cornstarch dust has caused an uptick in respiratory distress, asthma attacks and more severe allergies, according to the Texas climatologist's office.
But Dawson County farmers don't lie down before the wind. They scheme against it. No one plants east-west rows, lest prevailing west winds destroy a week's work in an afternoon. They contour-plow to blunt the wind and to conserve water. The practice of planting cover crops is an outgrowth of the Dust Bowl, when wind took empty, fallow fields.
Fewer farmers are walking off the land today than during the Dust Bowl. Men like Farmer are determined not to let that happen.
"You hope God gives you the strength to get over the drought," he said, tugging his white straw cowboy hat lower over his forehead. "If I fail, I've let my father and my father-in-law down. They all made it."
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