Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains
Pastor Dale Morgan
Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains*
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Financial Times
Updated: 1:40 p.m. MT Aug 29, 2006
MITCHELL, S.D. — With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe
drought has slowly sizzled a large swath of the Plains States, leaving
farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the
Dust Bowl of the 1930's.
The drought has led to rare and desperate measures. Shrunken sunflower
plants, normally valuable for seeds and oil, are being used as a
makeshift feed for livestock. Despite soaring fuel costs, some cattle
owners are hauling herds hundreds of miles to healthier feedlots. And
many ranchers are pouring water into "dugouts" — natural watering holes
— because so many of them (up to 90 percent in South Dakota, by one
reliable estimate) have gone dry.
Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, who has requested that 51 of the
state's 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area,
recently sought unusual help from his constituents: he issued a
proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.
"It's a grim situation," said Herman Schumacher, the owner of a
livestock market in Herreid, S.D., a small town near the North Dakota
line where 37,000 head of cattle were sold from May through July,
compared with 7,000 in the corresponding three months last year.
"There's absolutely no grass in the pastures, and the water holes are
all dried up. So a lot of people have no choice but to sell off their
herds and get out of the business."
Drought experts say parts of the states most severely affected —
Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming — have been left in far worse
shape because of recent history: several years of dry conditions, a
winter with little snow and then, with moisture reserves in the soil
long gone, a wave of record heat this summer.
By late August, rain had fallen several times in some areas, but Bob
Hall, an extension crops specialist at South Dakota State University,
said it amounted to "a drip in a bucket."
"The bottom line is that even if we got relief starting today, at this
minute," Dr. Hall said, "it would take a few years economically to recover."
As if earless, shriveled cornstalks were not enough, farmers and
ranchers say they carry a sense that their counterparts elsewhere seem
to be doing just fine, leaving them with what feels like an invisible
disaster, unnoticed by the outside world. Some farmers in Midwestern
states like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, as well as some in the eastern
sections of South Dakota and Nebraska, tell of a respectable growing season.
Even here in Mitchell, about 70 miles west of Sioux Falls, some
residents did not grasp the scope of the drought until the Corn Palace,
this city's tourist-luring castlelike civic center wrapped in hundreds
of thousands of ears of corn, announced that because there was not
enough of the crop, it would not redecorate this year for the 2007 season.
"We don't have any record of anything like this happening before," said
Mark Schilling, the director of the Corn Palace, a campy, 114-year-old
landmark promoted on highway billboards with endless corn puns.
"But if there's not a crop, there's not a crop," Mr. Schilling said quietly.
After weeks and weeks with little rain and high temperatures, one
farmer, Terry Goehring, watched the mercury spike to 118 degrees in his
Mound City, S.D., field one day in July. That was it. Mr. Goehring, who
has farmed since 1978, sold half his 250 head of Angus cattle.
"There was no corn," he said. "There was no hay. We had nothing. And in
that moment, I knew there was no choice."
Climatologists with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln said scientists deemed the weather
conditions and its effects in the areas of the worst drought a
once-in-50-years experience.
In some cases, it has been worse than that. On July 15, a weather
station in Perkins County, S.D., near North Dakota, recorded a
temperature of 120 degrees. That matched the highest ever reported in
the state since the start of such record-keeping in July 1936, said
Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the Nebraska center.
Given such conditions, it is hardly a surprise that crop estimates are
so gloomy. Steve Noyes, deputy director at the South Dakota field office
of the government's National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the
winter wheat crop here had shrunk by 43 percent from last year's;
alfalfa hay is expected to be down by 35 percent; and 22 percent of
pasture land is deemed "very short," with 35 percent "short," figures
significantly worse than those of a year ago.