It’s official: the current Texas drought has been the costliest in history, resulting in $7.62 billion in agricultural losses, according to an update today from the Texas AgriLife Extension Service at Texas A&M University. That’s nearly twice as high as the previous record, $4.1 billion in losses during the 2006 drought, and equal to nearly half […]
One popular solution to running low on water? Drill a well. In Texas alone, there are an estimated million of them. But with the extreme Texas drought stressing aquifers, while more and more people are sucking water out of them, many wells have ended up being too shallow. In its latest report on the drought […]
There’s a glimmer of hope for Texans bracing for another hot and dry summer.
It’s time for another update on the Texas drought from the U.S. Drought Monitor, published every Thursday morning. And sadly, the pattern of regression we’ve seen over the past few months has taken a slight step back. The numbers: Nearly 21 percent of the state is in the worst level of drought, “exceptional.” That’s 6 […]
Many rice farmers across southeast Texas have to face a sobering reality today: for the first time in history, they will not have water for their crops. What happens next?
Timing is everything, and the Texas Supreme Court’s recent decision on groundwater rights is no exception. After two years of nail-biting and speculation by land owners, conservationists, policy experts and a small army of lawyers, the ruling came down Friday afternoon. Andrew Sansom, director of the River Systems Institute, was attending a water law conference in […]
Welcome back to your weekly drought update. Every Thurdsay, the National Drought Monitor releases the latest data (collected each Tuesday), which provides a handy snapshot of where things are. And as of today, they’re pretty much in the same place they were last week. Not much improvement, but things haven’t gotten much worse, either: A […]
A deadline is looming for many rice farmers in southeast Texas. If there isn’t 850,000 acre-feet of water in the Highland Lakes by midnight tonight, the Lower Colorado River Authority will not be sending water downstream for rice farmers this year. In this video by Jeff Heimsath for StateImpact Texas, we travel to Bay City, […]
We won’t know for sure until midnight on Thursday, but there may not be enough water for rice farmers in southeast Texas this year.
If you’re a rice farmer in southeast Texas, chances are you’re taking a close look at the level of the Highland Lakes a few hundred miles away.
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