N.M. rancher: ‘It’s crazy dry’

GRADY — This is wheat and cattle country, where 18 inches of rain a year makes the prairie bloom. Even the roads here bow in respect to agriculture: Instead of running straight, they turn at right angles to make way for a patchwork of wheat fields and cattle pasture. Lane Grau drove me down one of those roads and then bounced us out into one of his pastures, where blue grama grass should be green and a few inches high in June. “I’m 51 years old. I was born here, and I’ve never lived anywhere else,” he told me. “And this is the worst I’ve ever seen it. It’s crazy dry.” He grows a few hundred acres of organic wheat, but makes most of his payday from selling breeding stock of creamy white Charolais cattle. “That was my wheat crop,” Grau said as we passed a field of sparse stalks a few inches high. We were a little more than a dozen miles from the Texas Panhandle, where Curry and Quay counties meet, on the high eastern plains. When we got to the grazing pastures, Grau didn’t bother to close the gate behind us, because he no longer keeps any cows here. When he stopped the truck, got out and kneeled down on dirt, I could see why. The ground was pocked with short brown tufts of dry grass and patches of dark gray grass that flaked off under the kick of a boot toe. Staring in 2011, he said, his land has gotten about 5½ inches of moisture on average. Grau, who told me he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change, told me 2011 was a year of extremes like he’s never seen on his land. “We had the coldest ever — it got down to negative 18. We had the driest ever — I had less than 3½ inches. And we has the hottest ever — we were 57 days of over 100 degree temperature.” What Grau thought was the worst is now looking like it could be repeated. We stood under a bright blue sky around lunchtime, and the thermometer registered 95 degrees. He’s had less than an inch of rain in 2013...more