The Long, Dry Fall of the Texas Rancher

Somewhere out in the northeast corner of Young County, about 40 miles south of Wichita Falls, an aging cattleman cups his gnarled hands around his mouth, and from it comes his call, high and sharp and short. It snaps over mesquite and chaparral with the clarity of a rifle's report. "Whoo!" His hands return to his sides as he scans the landscape. Post oaks stand blackly in the dim morning light, not far from where the West Fork of the Trinity sits shallow and still. He hears nothing and calls them again. "Whoo!" A half mile away, a cow responds, a deep bellow coming from its guts, terminating in a full-throated bawl. "I'd just as soon have them stay where they are," 82-year-old Jack Loftin says. "They just tromp. Every blade of grass is valuable."...Loftin's blue eyes dance over the backs of a few dozen head and one bull. He doesn't see the white one that's a bit of a loner, but figures she'll show up next time. She has to. There isn't enough growing out there to sustain a full-grown cow. He counts them and appraises their conditions, and shakes his head. "They're shrunk in the back, all right," he says, eyeing hides draped thinly over rib cages and sunken into the slopes of pelvic bones. "They'll get worse, I imagine." Across his pastures, the buffalograss — a hardy native grass that's supposed to be drought-resistant — is moisture-starved after the driest year in Texas history and a summer of triple-digit temperatures. It's common to feed during lean winter months, but it's a sign that trouble has come to cattle country when ranchers feed through the spring and summer. As their demand for feed rises, prices keep climbing, up to nearly $20 per hundred pounds. It doesn't sound like much until you do the math: 70 cows, 1,500 pounds per week, week in and week out for a year straight. Like just about every other cattleman he knows, Loftin was forced to sell off half of his herd this summer just to stay afloat, and very well may have to sell these too. Loftin clambers back into the truck's cab and activates the feeder. It spouts cubes as he drives in a long, slow arc. The cows jostle for position on the line, tossing off strands of saliva like spidersilk. The hollow noise of their large molars crushing cubes resounds. Loftin parks and walks across the pasture, scuffing along in a pair of lace-up brogans with leather peeling back from the toes. He ducks between strands of barbed wire hung from mesquite fence posts and, before long, comes to the only thing standing between what remains of his herd and the sale barn: a stock pond rimmed with ragweed and milkweed. It's down to five feet but holding for now. "If we could just get some rain," he says. "You'd be surprised how quick it could change."...Cattle auctions across the state are working overtime, running well into the early morning hours, and it isn't just the "open" (not pregnant) cows moving through the auction ring. Sale barn owners are disturbed by the number of young, productive cows with years of calving ahead of them, all headed to meatpacking plants — an indication Texas cattle ranchers are cashing out. The big operators who can afford it are trucking their herds to Nebraska and the Dakotas and Wyoming, leasing pasturage where grass still grows. Across the Texas countryside, an ecological and agricultural disaster is moving in slow motion...more