Texas Growers - Are You Surviving?

Our state climatologist says that another La Nina is forming in the Pacific now and that 2012 will be a repeat of 2011, which broke all existing drought records. The meteorilogical pattern is very similar to the severe Texas drought of the 1950's, but much worse due to increased carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Ag losses in Texas, at last count, were pushing 6 billion $. We are basically out-of-business. The only way our operation can survive is to spend big bucks drilling an irrigation well - and we ain't got the money.

Global Warming has been very controversial in this conservative state, but many of us are reluctantly beginning to consider the possibility. But even if it is true, nothing can realistically be done about it. Nobody is willing to revert to a nineteenth century lifestyle. Windmills, solar panels, electric vehicles - just a bunch of boondoggle and pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Aside from atomic (which the greenies also hate), there is no viable substitute for petroleum.

Jack

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Permalink Reply by Jack Ellis on October 29, 2011 at 12:33pm

Howdy, Dilliard ---

Yes, Im surely old enough alright - born in 1936, at the peak of the depression/dust bowl era. Actually, my people here didn't feel much of that compared to North Texas and the Panhandle. My grandfather said that people here were already as poor as human beings can get and didn't even know there was a depression going on LOL.

I haven't checked the historical records, but my sense is that they didn't suffer that much from the drought of the 30's here in SE Texas. This is the historic Big Thicket - wet, swampy woods with vegetation so thick that even a snake can't get through it!. The drought everyone remembers aound here was in the late fifties - terrible, much like this one - and it lasted for several years. After Hurricane Ike, we had a huge old oak tree fall here - one I used to climb as a kid in the forties. It had 132 rings, and the droughts were obvious - I could clearly see the great drought of 1912 (the worst on record until this year) and the dry periods of the thirties and fifties, The fifties were the worst - some of those rings were so close together we needed a magnifying glass to separate them! I don't know how people survived it - many didn't - they didn't live to be very old anyway - malnutrition(all they ate was corn and pork) and rampant diabetes from extensive in-breeding - my pa-pa said "There wasn't no girls but kin." I was lucky - my grandmother was a swede from Nebraska - and I don't have diabetes like everyone else!