LUBBOCK (AP) — The cotton harvest is about to get underway in the Texas High Plains, the windswept region that grows most of the crop in the nation’s top cotton-producing state. But Barry Evans, like many others, has already walked away from more than 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of his bone-dry fields.
“It just didn’t come up. We hardly had anything. It just wasn’t in the cards this year,” said Evans, a third-generation cotton grower.
Extreme heat and a dearth of rainfall have severely damaged much of this year’s cotton harvest in the U.S., which produces about 35% of the world's crop. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast that more than 40% of what U.S. farmers planted in the spring would be abandoned because of drought. Nowhere is this more apparent than the flat, dry stretch of Texas extending some 250 miles (402 kilometers) from Lubbock to the tip of the Texas Panhandle bordering Oklahoma.
