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8 Years of Drought Leaves Oklahoma Panhandle Dry

By Murray Evans

September 7, 2008

Oklahoma City, OK - In the far reaches of the Oklahoma Panhandle — near where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountain foothills — Brent Balenseifen will look up at gathering storm clouds in the western sky.

Somewhere, he knows, it's going to rain. But for most of the last eight years, that moisture usually hasn't fallen on Balenseifen's ranch near Keyes, or anywhere else in Cimarron County, for that matter.

"We call it the 'Cimarron split.' Those clouds will split up and pass around the county, then reform to the east," Balenseifen said. "It would be interesting to watch if we didn't need rain so bad."

The western Panhandle is normally an arid region. Boise City, the Cimarron County seat, has an average rainfall of about 17 inches, which area farmers will tell you is barely enough to grow a decent crop of corn.

But precipitation totals have been below normal since 2000, causing those in the Panhandle to make comparisons to the Dust Bowl, the famous drought years of the 1930s.

Through Wednesday, only 9.49 inches of precipitation have fallen this year in Boise City, according to the Oklahoma Mesonet, and that total includes an unusually high 4.71 inches in August.

Except for modern farming practices, locals say the Panhandle in 2008 would look much like the blowing-dirt photos from seven decades earlier. The soil is so dry that walking through some fields in the county is like walking on a sandy beach.

"We've got some erosion," said Cherrie Brown, a district conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Every time the wind blows, you can tell it on the cusps of the fields that don't have growth."

Stick a knife into the ground, and you'll go a foot before you'll find any moisture in the soil, Brown said.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the drought in Cimarron County — once rated as "exceptional," the most severe listing, now has improved to "severe" because of the recent rains.

"A drought is something that doesn't just happen overnight, it happens slowly and advances," she said. "We basically are still in a drought; we've just got more rain."

The drought dramatically affected this year's wheat crop. Rancher Jim Belford said irrigated fields that normally would produce 100 bushels an acre produced only 15 bushels an acre this year. John Elmer Williams, who operates a ranch west of Boise City, said production in his fields this year dropped from 94 to 43 bushels per acre.

The drought also has hurt the milo and corn crops now in the field — the crops either burned up or are growing at a slower-than-normal rate — although the recent rains have helped some.

"We are behind (in rainfall) but we're so much better than we were," Brown said. "It helps the psychological side of it more than anything. It brought back hope a little bit."

Still, hope only goes so far, and the lack of income from crops and the rising price of fuel have provided a double whammy to area residents.

Some ranchers, who depend on the crops to feed their cattle, have severely culled or completely sold off their herds, because they can't afford to buy feed — the price of which also has jumped because of transport costs — and because they need the money to keep their operations going.

"You just plant it, and if it grows, it grows," said Balenseifen, who said he had 500 cattle last year but none this year after selling them. "If it doesn't, you don't have an income."

Grazing now is allowed on area land that is a part of the Conservation Reserve Program, a federal program which pays farmers not to plant crops in order to return fields to native vegetation. Ranchers say while that's helpful, it's ultimately only a stopgap measure.

"We're burning equity right now," rancher Robert Gayler said. "This is a great 'next year' county. We say, 'Maybe it will be better next year.' But it's getting harder to say that."

Stephen Vaughan of Boise City, a farm loan officer for the Farm Service Agency's Farm Loan Programs, said farmers and ranchers from elsewhere Oklahoma have offered to donate hay to their Panhandle counterparts, but fuel costs to transport donations to such a remote area are prohibitive.

"That to me is just devastating," Vaughan said. "Somebody will give me something for free, yet I can't get it here because it costs too much."

The predicament is forcing some hard choices. Some ranchers, like Belford, have opted to sell cattle herds that have been in their family for decades.

Others, like the 56-year-old Williams, are trying to hold on. He is determined to maintain his herd of purebred Charolais cattle, but he's culling deeper than usual this year.

"We're fortunate compared to some ranchers because we raise our own feed," Williams said. "Except that's not free, because you can sell that feed instead of using it yourself."

When his own feed ran out in early May, he started buying more, which hasn't helped his bottom line.

"We're not going to sell out," he said. "We're going to cut them way back, but I've got 38 years in them.

"People sell their cow herds and they can use that money for a while, but when it runs out, what do you do? ... The way things are going now, you'd need a good crop to break even. In your good years, you're supposed to make money to get through the bad years."

Because of Cimarron County's remote location, 326 miles from the state capital of Oklahoma City, and lack of population — only about 2,900 people live in the county — locals have learned to be mostly self-sufficient.

"Let's be honest," Balenseifen said. "A lot of people in Oklahoma City don't even know we're here. We have to take care of ourselves."

It's to the point now that for some, that is no longer a viable option, said U.S. Rep. Frank Lucas, who himself is a western Oklahoma rancher.

"Our friends in the Panhandle are a tough, reliant breed of folks who don't cry out for help until they have no other choice," said Lucas, a Republican from Cheyenne. "They have waited, hoping it would come to an end, hoping things would get better. It didn't.

"They're fighting a tough fight. You can only stand so much tough luck."

Lucas and the state's two senators, Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn, pushed for a federal agricultural disaster declaration for the area, which makes farm operators in the two counties eligible for low-interest loans through the Farm Service Agency's Emergency Loan Program and payments from other federal programs. It also provides federal tax considerations to ranchers who sell livestock early because of drought conditions.

Lucas acknowledges that neither the government, nor anyone else, can provide what the area really needs — long, soaking rainfall over an extended period of time.

But despite the hardships of recent years, residents tout the county's wide-open spaces and natural beauty as reasons for staying.

"It's a whale of a good place to live," Gayler said.

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