The Forgotten Dust Bowl

Plains Farmers, Ranchers Suffer Through Several Years of Drought

Dan Miller
By  Dan Miller , Progressive Farmer Senior Editor
Jillane Hixson and her brother Ron walk through a windblown field where drought has turned the soil to powder. (Progressive Farmer photo by Russ Baldwin)

Jillane Hixson minces no words about the 3 1/2-year drought draped over her part of far southeast Colorado. She is frustrated with hours-long, hurricane-like dust storms and her daily battles against dust that are ruining both her home and her farm machinery.

Hixson is dismayed that the year-old California drought garners headlines, while the undeniable agricultural disaster outside her window seems all but forgotten. She's frustrated -- "angry" might be a better word -- with the government response.

On this 3,000-acre farm outside of Lamar, Colo., in Prowers County, there has been no normal harvest in three years. If conditions don't deteriorate further -- although, they seemingly are -- Hixson expects only a quarter of their wheat crop will be harvested this year. Hixson is the administrator for the multigenerational farm she works on with her brothers, Ron and Eric Hixson, and husband, Dave Tzilkowski.

"Another day in paradise ... ferocious wind/dirt storms continue ... 2012, 2013, 2014 in S/E Colorado. Without any significant rain, over a period of YEARS, the dirt is like 'brown flour,' any amount of wind (5 mph to 75 mph) causes DIRT STORMS throughout the region," she wrote, her emphasis preserved, in an email to The Progressive Farmer.

LIFE IN THE DIRT

There is no escaping the dirt. It has a taste. It has a smell. It coats the very air. It destroys motors and engines, and ruins high-tech gadgetry. The dust imposes a heavy mental, physical and financial hardship on those who can't escape it.

"I can't even begin to describe the brown, powdery dirt that is in the air everyday, everywhere," Hixson said, explaining that she and other farmers spread high-cost manure on fields in an attempt to keep the dirt in place.

A mid-March blinding dust storm shuttered U.S. Route 287 from Lamar south to Springfield, Colo., and the Oklahoma state line. Wind gauges recorded peak wind gusts of 69 mph in Prowers County.

Hixson describes these dust storms to a reporter from The Denver Post: "You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window. You know that it's your crop that's hitting the windows and blowing away ... "

To combat the roiling dust in their home, she and Dave tie handkerchiefs over their faces. "When we go to bed at night, all we can smell is dirt." They pull the blankets over their heads in a fruitless search of relief. "Each morning, we start the new day by wiping the dust off the coffee pot."

PLAGUE OF TUMBLEWEEDS

In photographs Hixson sent to The Progressive Farmer, the images of this dust bowl, extending into parts of Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, look eerily reminiscent of those historically famous photos made in the 1930s.

Clouds of dust turn daylight into dusk. Deep drifts of finely sifted dirt fill ditches and cover fences. A wind-borne plague of tumbleweeds buries homes, trucks and roads. Snowplows have been deployed to clear roads buried for miles at a stretch, most often to little effect.

"When you're looking at bare dirt and another crop that won't materialize, you don't see any light at the end of the tunnel," Hixson said. The last significant rain she recalls was 2007, when 4 inches fell in the middle of wheat harvest.

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But there's been little since. "Once in a while, dark, heavy clouds will emerge, but no rain comes," she said. "I just want to cry. It's just too disappointing when nothing happens."

Doug Hasser finds the sight otherworldly. "It's like standing on the moon," said the cattle rancher, who today works far fewer head than he did a year ago outside of Lamar. "It should look like a green shag carpet. There would be cattle all over this country, fat and with their calves. [But] nothing is green. Everything is brown."

BETTER YEARS

Southeast Colorado has not always looked like it does today. It's home to dryland farmers who can raise decent crops of wheat, corn, sorghum and forage on a normal, 12 to 15 inches of rain per year. The Arkansas River, its source in the Collegiate Peaks of the Rockies' Sawatch Range, was a dependable conduit of snowmelt to irrigated fields of alfalfa and cantaloupe. Native shortgrass prairies of buffalograss and blue grama grass fed herds of grazing cattle.

The Arkansas River will have more water this year because of a bigger snowpack in the mountains. But farmers don't expect to get their full irrigation allocations. Meanwhile, ranchers are chiseling native grasses to keep the dirt from blowing.

"The grass is long dead and gone," Hasser said.

The last recorded drought worse than this one was in the 1890s, said Colorado state climatologist Nolan Doesken. While the nation was glued to images of record floods last September across the front range of the Colorado Rockies north of here, the drought in southeast Colorado continued.

"The faucet has been shut off since August 2010," Doesken said. "Five years ago, we would have never expected to see this kind of [blowing dirt]. But it has been dry enough, long enough without significant rain that the [land] is getting barer and barer and barer."

To farmers and ranchers, normal times are a distant memory. There was a horrendous drought in 2002. It was largely over by 2004 but dragged on for some into 2007. "Then we limped along from 2007 to 2010, and it started all over again," Doesken said.

A drought map of the U.S., not including California, shows the outer boundaries of this drought have shrunk during the last year. Helpful rains even fell last fall over southeast Colorado. But the core of the drought remains in place, southeast Colorado included.

The southwest and western drought can be explained. Climatologists believe these events stem from natural cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans' sea surface temperatures that can lead to extreme heat and drought in the U.S., Becky Oskin, a freelance writer, wrote in an article last year for LiveScience (www.livescience.com). The two cycles, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, flip back and forth, in one case increasing rainfall and in the other, leading fairly predictably to drought in the Southwest, she wrote.

The Hixson farm has had in recent years just enough moisture for crops such as sorghum to emerge. But they quickly withered in the hot and dry winds.

"We are practically planting for the sole purpose of ground cover. If farmers did not practice good soil management, the conditions would be many times worse than in the Dust Bowl of the 'Dirty Thirties,'" Hixson said.

There is some expectation of an El Niño forming later this year. That brings with it an expectation of beneficial rains in Texas, perhaps Colorado. "But it's a bit less of a predictor [in Colorado]," Doesken said.

BUREAUCRATIC BLIZZARD

The drought has kept Hixson busy with a blizzard of paperwork to collect, not always successfully, insurance and disaster payments. She also endures bureaucratic demands that seem lacking in all good judgment.

The federal government did pay Colorado ranchers and farmers $56.4 million in disaster assistance in 2013. But Hixson said it doesn't make up for the biblical size of this disaster. More, Hixson said, "Government actions are worsening the dust bowl here."

In one instance, Hixson was told by a local county official to chisel-plow a field to control blowing dirt. Deep chisel-plowing one time makes sense as it throws up dirt clods less susceptible to blowing. But on this occasion, she was being told to make a second pass in the field, an act that Hixson said would only make the blowing dust worse.

Another issue is with Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) ground. USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service requires farmers to disc alternating 40-foot swaths of CRP ground.

The CRP has been a tremendously beneficial program that compensates landowners who agree to stop farming highly erodible ground. But, "it is insane to disc it in the middle of a drought and loosen up the soil," Hixson said.

WAITING FOR RAIN

It has been a dozen years since Hasser has recorded an average, annual rainfall.

"In most years, we've not even had half our annual rainfall," he said. "Unless you've lived it, it's hard to explain it," said Hasser, who, among other income-earning work, operates Hasser Well Service.

"We've come across wells that are dry, that have never been dry in 60 or 70 years," he said. Wells that reached down 150 feet now have to be drilled down to 300 feet.

"It's devastating," Hasser said, not for the first time in our half-hour phone conversation.

Hasser's home ranch sustains 150 cows today. A year ago, it held 400.

The story is true for many cattlemen in the area. Many ranches are at 15 to 20% of their former capacity because of the lack of adequate grazing ground. Some have sold their entire herd.

Hasser has sent many of his cows to greener pastures, those leased in other states. Some of his cattle are eight hours away. But he didn't want to liquidate his herd.

"I want to retain the good mama cows," he said. "I built the genetics, this herd, over a lifetime. [If I sell them] I'll never live long enough to get those genetics back."

(BAS)

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Dan Miller