High Plains

I'm Tom Nicoletti, and I'll have more from a poultry specialist on how Texas poultry producers keep their laying hens and gorillas cool during the summer heat on Texas Ag Today.

How is the silage market shaping up in the Texas High Plains? I'm James Hunt, and we'll talk about that on Texas Ag Today.

USDA has released its latest farm income projections.

I'm Jessica Dommel, and we'll have a rundown for you coming up on Texas Ag Today.

More with Dr. Greg Archer, Texas A&M Poultry Extension Specialist on our next program.

I'm Tom Nicoletti for the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network.

How is the silage market shaping up in the Texas High Plains? James Hott looks for an answer from the Panhandle.

As this year began, we were looking at a depressed silage market in the Texas High Plains.

What really divides America? The 100th meridian has always been North America's invisible continental hinge.

Running roughly from the Dakotas down through Texas, it marks the point where average annual rainfall drops below 20 inches and the lush eastern ecosystems give way to the semi-arid high plains and the deserts beyond.

What John Wesley Powell recognized in the 1870s that the West was too dry for traditional rain-fed agriculture remains painfully relevant today.

In fact, the distinction is sharpening.

The great eastern metropolism corridor from Boston to Washington, from Chicago to Atlanta, sit amid watersheds that can support both agriculture and millions of urban residents.

Water is sufficiently plentiful that its scarcity rarely dominates the political imagination the way it does in Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Denver.

consequently the east houses the majority of the u s population and the bulk of its economic infrastructure while the west remains comparatively empty despite its vast acreage west of the hundredth meridian aquifers are not merely water sources they are lifelines drawn from prehistoric reserves Unlike the East, where groundwater is generally replenished by reliable rainfall, the aquifers underlying the High Plains, Great Basin, and Southwest are largely non-renewable on human timescales.

The most consequential is the Ogallala Aquifer, the vast subterranean lake stretching beneath portions of South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.

Between 2000 and 2008, there were 25 cubic kilometers of water per year that have been depleted out of the groundwater systems.

This is happening in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, the Gulf Coastal Plain, the High Plains, that's the Ogallala, the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, and the Chicago-Milwaukee area, according to USGS.gov. Now the Ogallala water aquifer underlies parts of eight states.

In some areas, water levels have declined more than a hundred feet.

And I mentioned this a couple of months ago, I talked to a well driller in the county who told me, what was it? An average of 10 feet per year is what's dropping in Central Texas in terms of the water table, an average of 10 feet per year.

Proximity-wise

... yeah, on the High Plains, there's a lot of Broncos fans.

And so also the Oklahoma State, uh, connection, Tatum Bell, of course, uh, uh, played for the D- uh, the Denver Broncos, some other, uh, Broncos as well.

Uh, so upon being married, a Denver Broncos fan, so, uh, I d-

So yeah, absolutely, get him out of the country, um, and hopefully he'll come back after a couple of years moderated by his experience in the consumerist, capitalist world of the Midwest US.

Now, many of the accounts of Qutb's side, uh, focus on one particular evening in Greenley, Colorado, a small farming town on the High Plains, an hour north of Denver, on the edge of the Rockies.

It's a winter's evening in 1949, and in the hall of a local church, a dance is getting underway.

The pastor, wanting the young people to enjoy themselves, dims the lights and puts on a record on the gramophone.