{"id":38160,"date":"2014-08-12T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=38160"},"modified":"2014-08-11T14:19:44","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T19:19:44","slug":"during-drought-once-mighty-texas-rice-belt-fades-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2014\/08\/12\/during-drought-once-mighty-texas-rice-belt-fades-away\/","title":{"rendered":"During Drought, Once-Mighty Texas Rice Belt Fades Away"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"In<\/a>

Dylan Baddour \/ StateImpact Texas<\/p>

In the floodplain, several inches of fine silty mud sit atop thick, heavy clay. The clay is the finest dust eroded by the river, carried until this point then deposited as the river spreads out across the prairie. The silt is a thick rich mixture of sediment from upstream. The land in the floodplain naturally holds water very well.<\/p><\/div>\n

In\u00a02012<\/a>,\u00a0some farming districts on the Lower Colorado River were cut off from water for irrigation for the first time. Reservoirs were too low to flood tens of thousands of rice fields. Some asked, \u201cWhy would anyone be farming rice in Texas in the first place?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer is long, and it begins with the fact that parts of Texas haven’t always been dry. For farmers like Ronald Gertson, who remembers driving a tractor<\/a> through rice fields as a child, recent years have been hard to bear.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just unbelievable that it\u2019s been so bad that we have had three unprecedented years in a row, and I recognize some experts say we could have a couple of decades like this. I hope and pray that\u2019s not the case,\u201d says Gertson, a rice farmer, chair of numerous water-related committees and, in recent years<\/a>, unofficial\u00a0spokesman<\/a> for the Texas Rice Belt. \u201cIf that is the case then yeah, this whole prairie is going to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it has already changed.<\/p>\n