Texas Drought: Rice Farmers Will Not Receive Irrigation Water

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Central Texas river authority said Friday that Hill Country lakes fell short of levels sufficient to provide irrigation water to downriver rice farmers.

That makes 2012 the first year in which the farmers will not get the water from the Lower Colorado River Authority.

As of Friday morning, lakes Travis and Buchanan were about 3,200 acre-feet, or more than 1 billion gallons, short of the level they'd need to reach for the farmers to receive water.

LCRA spokeswoman Clara Tuma had said Thursday that the authority did not expect to reach the 850,000 acre-feet lake levels needed to provide water to the farmers.

Rice farmers have been preparing for such a situation for months. They've known the worst 1-year drought in Texas history had so severely depleted the Highland Lakes it was unlikely it could rain enough for them to plant their crops.

Texas is one of the six largest rice producers in the country. The farmers in the Colorado River basin make up almost three-quarters of the state's total rice acreage.

At current lake levels, a small percentage of farmers, those with senior water rights along the river, will get about 20,000 acre-feet of water. The rest will not get any.

The drought has eased in recent weeks with some significant winter rains. But most of the state still remains under some level of drought.

Comments

[jonoruf]

12:36 AM on 03/03/2012

So you mean growing rice in an arid climate is unsustainable and a bad idea?
As water sources and other finite resources dwindle, many people are going to find themselves in for world of surprise, and not a good one.

[mater]

11:03 AM on 03/03/2012

Water will cost as much as gasoline in my lifetime. Lots of new methods for growing food are priority One.

[jonoruf]

11:23 AM on 03/03/2012

Exactly! One of my business partners just got back from an organic farming conference and one of the speakers (I can't recall his name right now) was a soil specialist. He has figured out that if you have the right soil makeup, you can grow just about anything, anywhere. They are growing 10's of thousands of acres of corn in sand in an arid region of Africa, getting over 200 bushels an acre with NO irrigation. Meanwhile, Monsanto continues to try and develop 'drought' resistant corn hybrid, when the answer is so much simpler, and cheaper.