Lubbock has received enough rainfall over the past few weeks to no longer be considered in a drought, according to The National Drought Mitigation Center’s latest report.
After a significant dry spell in April led to concerns about the extent of the drought, over five inches of rainfall in May led to an improvement in Lubbock County’s drought conditions. The U.S. Drought Monitor currently lists most of Lubbock as having low-to-no drought conditions, meaning the county is out of the drought that plagued the region since Oct. 2021.
Kerry Siders, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension agent, said that although rain is always welcomed by the agriculture community, it kept growers out of the fields and delayed replanting seeds that were washed out. This impediment makes a big difference in yields when it’s time for harvest.
“If winter sets in early October [instead of] late October, it could really catch us in a bad situation where we don't mature at the crop,” Siders said. “Every day that we're delayed early in the season makes it that much more critical that we have additional time for warmth [and] moisture, all those things that kind of come together at the end of the season. And if it doesn't, then you'd have a short production year, and then quality is not good, and yields are not good.”
Notably, Siders said, the rain experienced over the past few weeks alone is not problematic for seed germination. However, the cooler temperatures that follow rainfall are a problem for cotton crops when they are in their most immature form.
Abnormally low temperatures for early June could set back cotton yields even further, Siders said. Cotton, a perennial tropical plant, typically does best in temperatures above 60 degrees.
“That's what we've seen where cotton that was planted,” Siders said. “Whether it was early May, mid-May, or even the last part of May, it may have germinated because the soil temperature was pretty good. But once it hit that air temperature that is cool, it has almost ceased and desists in making any progress physiologically.”
Further, Siders said, it is important to know that rainfall does not supplement irrigation. Rather, irrigation supplements rainfall when it is insufficient, and growers today “just don't have the irrigation that we [had] 25 years ago.”
Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for the Texas Panhandle, High Plains and South Plains regions because of the severity of the thunderstorms and subsequent flooding that began in the last week of May. The assistance is a welcome sign after a cotton infrastructure disaster relief grant was not included in the state’s adopted budget for the biennium.
The grant, a one-time budget rider that would have supplied $50 million in support for cotton growers following a historically punishing 2022 crop year, would not have been derived from general revenue funds but from the Coronavirus Relief State Fiscal Recovery Fund established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Growers last year planted 7.7 million acres of cotton, of which 3.75 million acres had to be abandoned due to the unfavorable weather, according to data from Plains Cotton Growers. While the state-wide abandonment rate was nearly 50% in 2022, the High Plains region fared the worst with 72.3% of its crops ending up abandoned.
Kody Bessent, CEO of PCG, said that the failure to include the grant in the budget will have an overall impact on the state’s cotton infrastructure that remains to be fully seen.
“When it's all said and done, we will more than likely see some infrastructure that will fail and never come back again,” Bessent said. “And that was something we were working very vividly on trying to do on a proactive and a preventative based measure for this one-time based assistance.”
Those struggles are not limited to just cotton growers as the entire state agricultural economy is still in the process of rebounding from the tumultuous 2022 crop year. Although rain and flooding have not caused too many issues for growers, Bessent said “the ag economy is still very, very challenged, just given the overall conditions.”
Another example of these struggles came from extensive cattle losses caused by severe flooding in the Panhandle region. Powerful storms in Deaf Smith and Castro Counties caused flooding that led thousands of cattle to perish, particularly in feedlots in and around Hereford.
Members of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association issued a joint statement in response to the cattle losses. The feeders expressed gratitude for the “outpouring of support” in response to the flooding.
Recovery efforts were focused primarily on caring for unaffected cattle and repairing damaged infrastructure, like roads and drainage systems. The feeders also stated that they were in the midst of managing the most unfortunate part of the disaster — appropriately disposing of cattle that were lost.
“We’ve been in close coordination with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Texas Animal Health Commission throughout the response and recovery,” TCFA said in a written statement. “Carcass removal and disposal has been completed, with a total of 4,000 head lost as a result of the natural disaster. Daily feedyard operations have returned to normal and based on the latest weather forecast it appears our region will experience a normal summer weather and precipitation pattern over the next few weeks.”