Livestock pastures on many Houston-area farms are turning to dirt, some covered in 1-inch cracks that would take a tropical storm to fill.<\/p>\n
At the same time, an auction house west of Houston reports an ever-increasing stampede of cattle being sold. Ranchers say they do not have the food and water to keep them alive.<\/p>\n
Yellowing, burned-out fields of corn, meanwhile, are so stunted that sometimes they don’t even produce a single ear.<\/p>\n
Texas farmers and ranchers report their livestock and crop prospects in most every sector are withering under the relentless heat and drought as experts fear the state’s $100 billion agriculture market is poised to face an all-time record loss.<\/p>\n
Travis Miller, who heads the state’s agriculture extension service in College Station, predicts that this year the state will more than double its worst recorded loss of $4.1 billion in 2006.<\/p>\n
“The 2006 drought hit only the bottom third of our state, but this one is more extreme and striking 90 percent of the state,” he explained.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday released its first snapshot of the anticipated crop harvests for 2011.<\/p>\n
It paints a bleak picture for Texas: cotton production (Texas’ No. 1 cash crop) is expected to plummet by 43 percent compared with last year; corn is expected to drop by 41 percent; winter wheat fell by 60 percent; sorghum (feed grain) is down by 46 percent; soybeans (a smaller Texas crop) dropped 61 percent; rice (the only bright spot because it’s irrigated) still declines by 4 percent.\u00a0Read more: <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Livestock pastures on many Houston-area farms are turning to dirt, some covered in 1-inch cracks that would take a tropical storm to fill. At the same time, an auction house west of Houston reports an ever-increasing stampede of cattle being sold. Ranchers say they do not have the food and water to keep them alive. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5071,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5069\/revisions\/5071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebarrelracing.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}