Texas Agriculture Withers Under Drought

Marketplace:

Eve Troeh: If you take the 500-mile drive from Austin to Amarillo, every other tree is dead, and every farmer's lake is bone-dry.
Jack Plunkett runs a market research firm in Houston.

Jack Plunkett: I think you really can't appreciate how bad this has been until you get out there and see it.

Ranchers have lost at least 600,000 cows so far. They slaughtered older cows when the drought hit. Now they've cut into breeding stock.
And Texas is so big, it's not like other states can just pick up the slack.

Plunkett: This business isn't going to move to Nebraska just because it's dry in Texas. It's just not going to work that way.

Plunkett says it'll take years for Texas grass to grow back enough to feed cattle. He expects steak prices to beef up by the end of 2012. And as for the other pillar of Texas agriculture:

Mike Stevens: The largest contiguous cotton patch in the entire world.

Cotton analyst Mike Stevens says half the farmers abandoned their crops last summer. Most got paid, thanks to crop insurance. And, frankly, the world hasn't missed Texas cotton.

What a disaster.  And to make matters worse, it looks like the La Nina has settled in for another winter.  I wouldn't expect much rain in Texas, much like I'm expecting another wet spring here.