WEATHER: The Big Dry

“Of the many natural forces that wage war on farmers and ranchers, the most demoralizing is prolonged drought. In its grip the individual farmer is well-nigh helpless.” Harking back to his own boyhood days, when drought helped plunge his father into debt, the President of the U.S. thus assessed the plight of hundreds of thousands of American farmers one day early this fall. To aid them, he went on, his Administration has instituted the most extensive relief program in the nation’s agricultural history. Last week Dwight Eisenhower raised the possibility that the Federal Government may try to do more to help the drought victims. From his Augusta. Ga. headquarters, Ike announced plans to inspect personally the parched farmlands of the Great Plains and the Southwest.

Cancer on the Land. The announcement of the President’s trip dramatized a remarkable situation: almost without notice elsewhere in the country, one of the worst droughts of all time has spread like a massive cancer across the heartland of America. It has lasted for slightly less than two years in some areas, for an unbelievable ten years in others. Blighted by it today is more than half the nation’s land surface—approximately 1,700,000 sq. mi. in 26 states. It is at its worst, in terms of both intensity and duration, in half a million sq. mi. of the Southwest (see map). Streams and lakes have vanished, century-old trees have shriveled and died, millions of citizens have suffered economic loss and personal hardship.

But the spectacular phenomena which became the symbols of human misery during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s have been largely missing during the Big Dry of the 1950s. There has been no mass exodus from the land, no flivver-powered migration to the green valleys of California, no grim threat of starvation. Even the ugly, rolling dust clouds of 20 years ago have been comparatively rare. The three big reasons: 1) in the booming national economy of 1956, many a farmer has been able to feed his family, pay his bills and save his land by taking a job in the nearest industrial plant; 2) conservation and land-management advances, e.g., irrigation projects, deep plowing, the intelligent use of cover crops, have saved much of the soil and some of the crops; 3) the Eisenhower Administration’s program of soil-bank payments, liberalized credit, freight-rate reductions and subsidization of stock-feed purchases for drought-plagued farmers has taken up some of the slack.

Beneath the Cushions. But for all the mid-century cushions, the current drought has exacted its toll. In five years, it has stolen an estimated $2.7 billion from the pockets of Texas farmers and ranchers alone; over its entire area, the total is many times higher. Too frequently, those hit hardest have been those least able to resist. Among them: cotton-growing tenant farmers in Oklahoma and Texas, whose seared fields have not yielded so much as a bale in two, three, even four years; small stockmen in Arizona, New Mexico. Colorado, Nevada, who have been forced to sell off even their breeding stock; dairymen in Missouri and Kansas, who have spent their lives building up small but good herds but can no longer feed and water them.

Cutting back, selling off stock and equipment to meet a mortgage payment, holding on just a little longer in the hope that some day the rains will come again, most farmers are refusing to give up the fight, with the kind of hope and persistence that only farmers know. One rain, they realize, will not end a drought. In many areas, not even a winter of heavy snow will make much difference. What Nature has taken years to destroy, she now must take years to rebuild.