The New York Times say so . . .

The Gray Lady doesn't always overlook the common folk:

February 12, 2009
BEEVILLE JOURNAL: Texas Ranchers and Farmers Struggle in Drought
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
BEEVILLE, Tex. — Austin Brown II kicked the sandy dirt near a feedlot with his spurred boot and surveyed the land his family has ranched for three generations.
Most years the first green shoots of spring and pink bursts of paintbrush flowers would be rising from the soil by now. Nothing meets his eye but brown grass, dried up oaks and dust billowing in the wind.
“You can see how the sand is just drifting,” said Mr. Brown, 65, digging his toe into the dust piled up at his feet. “This normally would be grass.”
The worst drought in nearly 100 years is racking three-quarters of Texas. Much of the state has not had a significant rainfall since August. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting.
“The last time we had a drought this bad was in January 1918,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist. “The droughts in the 1950s in individual years were not as bad as this.” Mr. Nielsen-Gammon, a professor at Texas A&M, said the weather had been unusually dry for the last year and a half, but since August, much of the central part of the state — a broad swath from just south of Dallas, through Austin and San Antonio and down to Corpus Christi — had gotten little or no rain. Even last year’s hurricanes, Dolly and Ike, did not help, he said.
Though about a half-inch of rain fell in Austin and Dallas this week, it was not enough to offset the 20-inch deficit in rainfall over the last 18 months, he said.
A weather pattern over the Pacific known as La Niña has pushed the jet stream north, keeping the normal fall and winter rains away, meteorologists say. In the last three months, only about a quarter of the usual rain and snow has fallen across the state.
“We are dry from the Rio Grande Valley through the High Plains — there is no subsoil moisture,” said Travis Miller, head of soil and crop sciences at the Texas AgriLife Extension Program. “I really don’t think anybody’s going to plant until we get significant moisture.”
The time for planting corn and sorghum is passing fast. In central Texas, farmers plant corn from mid-February to late March, hoping to harvest it before the intense summer heat in August. Sorghum is planted a bit later, in late April. The last option is cotton, which can be planted as late as May.
Archie Abrameit, the manager of the Stiles Farm Foundation, a state-owned farm of 2,900 acres near Thrall, said the parched soil thwarted the winter wheat from coming up. Farmers have no hope that the spring crops will do better, since not even wild plants are sprouting.
“We make the joke we can’t even grow weeds this winter,” Mr. Abrameit said.
As a result, farmers have found themselves playing a guessing game. Does one plant corn now and hope for rain, or wait for rain, hoping it comes in time to plant sorghum? Or wait still later and plant cotton, which can be grown until later in the summer? Some admit privately that they will plant knowing the crop will fail in hopes of collecting insurance. Others say they may not plant at all.
“The clock is ticking as far as coming up to planting time,” said Terrell Hamann, who farms 1,800 acres near Taylor, just northeast of Austin. “I change my mind about three times a day about what to do.”
Complicating the calculus for farmers and ranchers, prices for grain and beef have dropped, as people across the country have cut their spending in the economic crisis.
At the Brown Ranch in Beeville, about 85 miles southeast of San Antonio, the family is bracing for what could be a terrible year. So far, Mr. Brown and his son, Austin Brown III, have kept their 2,000 head of Angus, Hereford and Akaushi cattle watered by pumping well water into troughs, at great cost in electric bills. They have also dipped into the ranch’s savings to buy hundreds of bales of hay and hundreds of pounds cottonseed “cake,” dense protein-rich pellets, to feed the animals.
As the younger Mr. Brown spread the cottonseed cake on the ground on a recent afternoon, a hungry mob of Hereford cows chased after his truck, jostling and bumping one another. The ground was devoid of green life as far as the eye could see. The cows and their calves had devoured a towering roll of hay left for them but could find nothing to forage.
“When the grass is real green and lush and they have a lot to eat, they won’t hardly come to you,” the younger Mr. Brown said.
A point comes when the cost of feeding the cattle in a drought becomes so high it makes no sense to continue, the elder Mr. Brown said. Then all or part of the main herd of reproductive cows and bulls must be slaughtered. It is a prospect every rancher fears, for that core herd is what produces a yearly bounty of calves to be raised and fattened for the market.
“We are going to try to keep these cattle going into June,” the elder Mr. Brown said, “and if we don’t get any rain by June, then it’s all over and we will have to send them to market.”

For more pictures, here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/02/12/us/20090212drought_index.html