Texas drought has farmers and ranchers on the ropes

The wind in West Texas is famously powerful and incessant. But this year, more big blows than anyone can remember have roared through, stripping away precious topsoil and carrying off another season of hope for farmers and ranchers. Everywhere, it seems, the land is on the move: sand building up in corners of the just-swept front porch and coating clean laundry on the line, dust up your nose and in crevices of farm machinery. Drive along unpaved county roads and the farmers' plight becomes clear: Wind rakes the surface, scouring sand into adjacent fields, sweeping into farmers' deeply tilled furrows. These clogged fields are said to be "blown out," and some of them belong to Matt Farmer. He grows cotton and peanuts here, or would like to, but this spring the sand, he says, keeps "ooching and ooching" into his fields. On a recent windy day, Farmer got out of his truck to inspect his cover crop of wheat. In a normal year, the wheat would be about knee high. This is not a normal year; the anemic stalks barely rise above the heel of Farmer's dusty boots...more

Read the LA Times story above and here is an interesting video also put together by the Times: