Cotton farmer Brian Adamek figures he’ll lose about $750 an acre on his 2,000-acre South Texas farm this year because of a summerlong drought that has plagued Texas.
Record-high temperatures reaching over 100 degrees for 40 days this summer scorched the livelihoods of many Texas farmers and might affect next year’s crops, too. In the High Plains area around Lubbock and Amarillo, the most productive of the state’s nine cotton-growing regions, experts at Texas Tech University are predicting a $2.1 billion hit to this year’s harvest.
“It’s just too dry and too hot,” said Adamek, who comes from a family of farmers and grows cotton and corn at his farm in Victoria, just 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas’ Coastal Bend region. He harvests and sends off cotton to a local co-op that processes it for buyers.
