Fear In A Handful Of Dust

[cali]

Scott Craft knew right away that something was wrong. In all his time at Cargill Meat Solutions, a beef-processing plant just north of Plainview, Texas, he had never seen so many security guards as were on duty that day in January 2013. During Craft’s six years at the plant, he had been promoted from the kill floor to the butchering line (known as “fabrication” or just “fab”) to a warehouse manager, so he happened to be outside on the loading dock when the line of cars pulled through security.
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The plant sat on a lonely stretch of Interstate 27, roughly halfway between Amarillo and Lubbock. It was bordered to the west by the highway and the freight railway but was otherwise isolated—well outside the Plainview city limits, surrounded by expanses of cotton fields, and accessible only by a lone farm-to-market road, unused except for the steady flow of cattle trailers in and out of the loading area. By nine-thirty that morning, as the line of cars parked in the employee lot, the sun was high and so bright that the concrete plant seemed to glow white under the glare. Men with briefcases, flanked by additional security guards, exited the cars and disappeared through the main entrance.

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Soon, environmental activists and reporters began to ask whether “drought”—a temporary weather pattern—was really the right term for what was happening in the state, or whether “desertification” was more appropriate. “We’re on our fourth year of drought,” Katharine Hayhoe, director of the climate science center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, told the industry magazine Meatingplace. “In order to replenish depleted reservoirs and soil moisture, we don’t need just a normal year or just a single rainfall. We need an unusually wet year to get back to normal conditions.” But the early months of 2015 have seen less than 1.4 inches of total precipitation—not even a third of what is considered normal rainfall, much less enough to replenish surface water and groundwater resources.

In fact, hydrologists estimate that even with improved rainfall, it could take thousands of years to replenish the groundwater already drawn from the South Plains. If sustained rains don’t come soon, the tiny cattle towns of the Panhandle and across North Texas, already in decline for decades, may be pushed out of existence. Their residents, like the workers displaced by the Cargill plant closure, may be forced north in the first wave of U.S. climate change migrants, as the national cattle herd constricts around a narrower band in the center of the country and the nation’s food supply becomes ever more reliant on the deepest parts of the Ogallala Aquifer in Kansas and Nebraska. Worse still, for Cargill, as the public begins to worry that the drought in Texas, and the equally alarming drying out of Central California, might be the status quo instead of a seasonal calamity, they are also beginning to question whether the beef industry might not only be victim to the ravages of climate change but also significantly to blame.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121558/what-climate-change-doing-texas-cattle-ranch