After three fairly wet years, a drought ranging from “severe” to “exceptional” has descended on the southern Great Plains of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Wall Street Journal reported. Home to one of the nation’s most fertile farming areas — crop production in the Texas region alone generates about $12 billion in economic activity — observers say the drought could punish the agricultural sector, affecting everything from cotton to cattle to farming-equipment sales. “It’s going to be in the billions in terms of crop loss,” said Darren Hudson, director of the International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. A semiarid region, the southern Plains region has seen drought conditions for much of the last decade, but the severity of this latest dry spell is of particular concern. For many farmers here, the sudden falloff in precipitation is reminiscent of the devastating drought of 2011 when Texas agriculture lost $7.6 billion, the worst losses on record in the state.
