Intense ‘flash drought’ drops dust, dread on Southern farmers

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. — A furnacelike “flash drought” is intensifying as it blasts away the little moisture left across a vast swath of the South, wilting garden plants and raising alarm among farmers, according to a weekly report updated Thursday.

Nearly 56 million residents are now living in drought conditions in parts of 16 Southern states, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor report. That drought is classified as extreme in areas in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida. From the arid plains of Texas to farms in Maryland, concern is spreading that cattle, cotton and corn are suffering after a summer of record highs and little rain.

One of the bull’s-eyes marking the nation’s driest areas points to Georgia’s Bartow County — farm country northwest of Atlanta — where extreme drought has left pastures bare and kicked up buckets of dust.

“If we don’t get enough rain and the pastures don’t recover, we’ll be dipping into winter feeding hay before time, or have to liquidate some cattle,” said Dean Bagwell, who has 350 cows now on land his family has farmed for nearly a century. Between the weather and relatively low cattle prices, he says “it just all plays into the frustration of trying to make a living farming.”

The drought has ravaged the pastures where cattle and other livestock feed. Most of these fields are in either poor or very poor condition in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and West Virginia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in its most recent crop report. Pasture and range conditions are even worse in Virginia, where 71 percent of the land is in poor or very poor shape.

At Pettit Creek Farms in Cartersville, Ga., where people come to see the kangaroos, camels and other wildlife, owner Scott Allen points out the “baked mud” and cracked earth in the bed of a small stream near his zebras. The natural spring water is nearly dried up, so he’s using municipal water.

“It’s been probably better than 60 days since we had any precipitation that amounted to anything,” Allen said. “The dust is just relentless.”

Thursday’s drought report shows nearly half the population is experiencing drought in Texas, where the USDA crop report shows nearly a quarter of the cotton in poor or very poor condition. The situation is also dire in North Carolina, where 40 percent of the cotton and 30 percent of the corn is in poor or very poor shape. In Georgia, nearly 20 percent of the peanuts are in poor or very poor condition.

Forecasters blame the heat, along with the lack of rain: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida all saw their driest September on record. Texas and Louisiana suffered through their hottest September on record, according to the report.

The combination of dry weather and intense heat can create what’s now called a “flash drought.”

The term came about during a 2001 drought in the Great Plains, when Mark Svoboda, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, was looking for a way to describe its rapid onset. The “flash drought” phrase resonated, making headlines in the Omaha World-Herald and beyond. Back then, Svoboda and other scientists had few tools to track flash droughts, but since then, satellite imagery has provided much better data to monitor a rapidly spreading drought, he said.