Floods and Drought Cause Headaches in the United States
June 16, 2011 What a difference 12 months can make. After enjoying a near-perfect season for cotton last year, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety among growers in the United States due to ongoing adverse weather:
- In West Texas, farmers can’t see their plants because one of the most severe droughts in the state’s history is preventing crops from growing.
- In the Mid-South, farmers can’t see their plants either—but that’s because they’re underwater due to devastating floods.
Whither the water?
Severe drought in the High Plains of Texas, the world’s largest contiguous cotton patch, will lower U.S. cotton production this year. Recently, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) lowered its May 2011 crop estimate by 1 million bales. Lowering the estimate this early is deemed highly unusual by industry leaders.
The dryland cotton crop in West Texas is likely going to be abandoned, according to Dr. Kater Hake, vice president of agricultural research with Cray, NC-based Cotton Incorporated, and many believe that the USDA could lower its production estimate again in coming months.
Steve Verett, a well-respected cotton farmer and the executive vice president of Lubbock, Texas-based Plains Cottons Growers (PCG), warned that significant rainfall is needed to salvage dryland cotton.
“I am a glass full kind of a person, but we have to face reality,” said Verett, indicating that a turnaround in crop production is highly unlikely this year. Even those with irrigated crops can’t outlast the drought forever, Verett says, and at some point farmers will simply have to shut of the water. Dr. Hake agreed, adding that the limited availability of water this summer will limit production.
Shawn Wade, director of policy analysis and research at PCG, says, “At this time, there appears to be real potential for the High Plains region to produce as much as 2 million fewer bales in 2011 than were produced in 2010.”
The High Plains area in West Texas produced about 30 percent of the total U.S. cotton crop last year.
When it rains … it floods
Meanwhile, 700 miles to the southeast, thousands of growers are forced to sit idly by, shut down by inclement weather. The situation in the Mid-South is especially bitter, however, because some farms are devastated by flooding while others are desperately in need of rain.
“We’re just sitting here sitting on our hands, because we can’t even plant our fields that aren’t under water. We’ve had a drought down here. We haven’t had rain in a couple of months,” says George LaCour, a farmer in Batchelor, Louisiana, who finds himself wishing for rain to fall on some of his land while simultaneously praying that the flood waters on other parts of his land will recede.
Countless growers up and down the Mississippi River share in his dilemma in the Mid-South’s most concentrated cotton-producing region. Heavy April storms in the upper Mid-South and throughout the Mississippi River’s drainage network helped create a volume of water in the Mississippi River basin that set flood-stage records in Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. For LaCour and other farmers in his region of Louisiana, severe natural flooding began in late April.
LaCour eventually lost 1,000 acres to the flooding–and that was before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway on May 14, effectively flooding thousands more of his acres for the remainder of the summer. LaCour, looking for a silver lining in this dark cloud, says the decision to open the spillway flooded his land but was necessary to prevent the Mississippi River from destroying his home.
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