Rain (or the lack thereof)

July 22, 2011 
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These pictures were taken the last time we had the hope of rain several weeks ago.  As you can tell our fields still looked pretty good, although the cracks were already starting.

I have lived in Texas my entire life and here on the blackland for over 4 years so you would think I would be used to lack of rain and the cracks that come with it, but it never ceases to amaze me.  I can’t help but go, wow, what a bummer our grass is drying up and our animals will soon have nothing to eat, but JUST LOOK AT THESE AWESOME CRACKS!  ”Hey Nathan watch this! I can stand up to my knees in this one, Oh whoops, I just fell into that one and almost broke my leg…” (yes, I am very easily entertained, but I live in the middle of nowhere so I take my entertainment wherever I can get it.)

Some of our blackland is actually worse than others.  We have one section of Houston blackland that is cracked so badly it looks like little islands everywhere–without the water of course.  This creates an interesting experience when walking across this field in the dark with buckets of feed for the pigs, (we do a lot of feeding in the dark with this kind of heat) and while Nathan always has his handy dandy light strapped to his head I would rather stumble around in the dark falling into cracks and exclaiming “Hey, you’ve got to come see this one, I just lost a bucket into it, it’s huge!”

These are actually fairly minor cracks in our yard.  The ones in the fields are 4 ft deep or more, but I didn’t feel like traipsing out there with the camera to take pictures–knowing me I would drop the camera into one and loose it      forever.

Once we get this far into July it is  unlikely that we will get anymore  rain until September, which does  not bode well for  our  pastures.  We  have had more rain than a lot of the  rest of the state so I am thankful for  that.  We also have 50 acres of bottomland established with native grasses which develop  incredible root systems and continue to grow even in drought conditions, but this weather  forces us to use it for grazing rather than baling hay which we will need for the winter.

Many ranchers sell off stock when this happens and then re-stock the next year.  For us  this is a very very last resort because we have worked so hard to select our animals for the  ability to grow well on grass alone and have exceptional meat, not to mention they are all  rare breeds that are difficult to find.  So, we do what we can, find the humor where we can  ”hey look at this one, you could play hide and seek in this crack!” and leave the rest up to God.