Phillip and Doris Smith have owned and operated the Sunrise Ranch in the Texas panhandle for half a century. The farm has been in Doris's family since 1906. They've seen plenty of dry years before, they say, but the drought that has burned across the high plains for the last two years, killing their crops and threatening their herds, is different. "We've never seen anything like this before," says Doris.
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Phillip Smith inspects a crop of forage sorghum, also know as hay graze. Like about a quarter of his neighbors, Smith is a dry-land farmer who does not use irrigation systems but relies instead on rain or snowfall for moisture. The drought killed his sorghum crop.
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Phillip Smith looks through wheat left over from an earlier harvest. The Texas AgriLife Extension Service estimates 2011 losses on major crops and livestock caused by the drought at $7.6 billion. Add in damage done by wildfire, and the total is $8.5 billion. The cost of this year's drought in West Texas isn't in yet.
The Smiths' farmhouse, where Doris was born and grew up, is full of her skillful paintings, including this portrait of her husband, which hangs in the living room.
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There is no such thing as a typical farmer, but the Smiths, both 73, are smack in the middle of one demographic: farmers 70 and over compose the largest single age group among Texas farmers, numbering 57,227 in 2007. The number of Texas farmers under 25, in stark contrast, was 914. And between 1997 and 2007, the average age of a Texas farmer rose from 56 to 58.9, second in the nation only to New Mexico.
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Phillip Smith inspects his dwindling herd of red angus cattle. The drought destroyed his hay harvest, and the cost of hay and other feed has skyrocketed, meaning that he, like most other ranchers in Texas and now the Midwest, has the choice of thinning the herd or watching it starve. The Smiths currently have nearly 80 head of cattle, half of what they had before the drought, but they fully expect to cull the herd even further.
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An irrigated crop of milo, or grain sorghum, near the Sunrise Ranch. After the 1950s drought, Texas built 126 reservoirs across the state, and farmers also began installing extensive (and expensive) irrigations systems in the Texas panhandle, a practice that has gravely stressed the Ogallala aquifer than runs beneath the region, exhausting it completely in some places. In the distance is an energy-producing windmill farm, an increasingly common sight on the high plains.
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Doris and Phillip Smith at home. "We do enjoy being producers," Doris says. "There's a real sense of pride." "We enjoy propagating life," Phillip says, "watching our cattle grow. It's a business, yes, but it's also part of our lives."
Roberto Rodriguez for The Daily Beast
