AGRICULTURE: Dry Disaster

In the green Tea Room of Kansas City’s Muehlebach Hotel one morning last week, Dwight Eisenhower sat down with the governors of twelve states to work on a crucial problem: drought. Almost every state in the U.S. has been affected, one way or another, by 1953’s hot, dry weather. The first state in which dryness turned to drought and drought turned to disaster was Texas (TIME, July 6). By last week, sections of 13 states* had been declared disaster areas by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Missouri, where the President and the governors met to attack the problem, was the hardest hit of all.

Last year was the driest on record in southern Missouri, even drier than disastrous 1936. This year, so far, has been worse. In the 22 months since December 1951, the moisture deficiency in the southern half of Missouri amounts to a million tons of water for every square mile of tillable land. Said Charlie Williford, U.S. weatherman in Springfield: “All we need is five inches of snow for a week, and a cloudburst in between.”

“I’ll Come Back.” The toll in southwest Missouri’s beef and dairy country is sickening. Millions of acres of pasture are dead right down to the roots, thousands of trees are dying, stock ponds are muddy hollows, trucks are hauling water to farms in almost every conceivable kind of container. Thousands of farmers, running out of grain and hay, are dumping part or all of their cattle on the market at sacrifice prices. For the past two months, the stockyards in St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield have been jammed to the gates with calves that should have been kept on the farm.

The case of lean, black-haired Utah G. Creek, who has lived all of his 38 years near Raymondville, is typical. He sold all 65 of his dairy cattle, got an average of $58 for milk cows that would have brought an average of $250 last year, $37 for heifers that would have sold for $165. He is going to leave his 500-acre farm for a year or so, hopes to get a job in St. Louis to earn money for another try. Said he: “I’ve got to come back. This is the only life I know. I’ll come back. There just can’t be more than one or two years as dry as this in any man’s lifetime.”

Hundreds of farmers are following the same desperate course. In the past few weeks, more than 300 farmers and farm laborers around Springfield have asked the Missouri State Employment Service’s regional office for city jobs. Said the service’s area chief, Richard L. Donnell: “A lot of those that come in are worth thousands of dollars in land and equipment . . . but they don’t have any cash, so they’re going to try to earn their family’s keep and their farm’s upkeep until their farms can provide a living again.”

The drought is having an economic impact that reaches far beyond the farm. Throughout southwest Missouri, farm-implement sales have dwindled, sales of cars, television and radio sets have almost stopped. Every line of business has felt the slump.

The Perennials. Worse than the immediate impact is the long-range aspect of the drought. Pastures and cattle are perennials. Reseeded pastures will not grow back to normal for several years. A big percentage of the cattle and calves being shipped to market now are animals that should have produced calves and milk in the future. It will take southern Missouri years, perhaps a decade, to recover.

Faced with the prospect of both short-and long-range disaster, the governors naturally wanted to know what the Federal Government would do. President Eisenhower was for a program based on “the principle of partnership” between Federal and state governments, and that kind of plan was adopted. The Federal Government, which has allotted $160 million for emergency loans and feed, will pay half the cost of shipping hay into the stricken states. Secretary of Agriculture Benson, who attended the Kansas City conference, announced that western railroads have agreed to continue, for 30 days, a policy of carrying drought-relief hay at 50% of the normal freight rate. The governors promised that their governments would distribute the hay to farmers.

With this short-term solution agreed upon, the governors and Secretary Benson turned their long-range attention toward development of a “continuing program” of federal-state cooperation in disaster relief. While they worked on that, all of them would continue to hope that the problem will be solved as it was created—by the forces of nature.

-The 13: Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina. Requests for disaster designation are pending from Wyoming and Utah.