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![]() Drought causes problems for El Paso farmers Johnny Stubbs owns a farm in Clint near El Paso, on the US side of the US/Mexico border. His family has farmed the land for generations growing cotton, pecan nuts, feed crops, corn silage, wheat and onions. The area has experienced the worst drought for 50 years and, as he told BBC World Service, scarce water supplies are dictating the nature of farming. "We started experiencing the drought about two years ago. We’ve been experiencing low rainfall for longer than that. The consequences are that there is a low amount of water in our reservoir. "Farmers are looking now at an allotment of water of 11% of what we’d normally get. It means a curtailment of the amount of land we can farm, different crops, crops that use less water. "It is really difficult to be able to plan because you don’t know when the run offs are going to be, how much water you’ll have by the end of the year, so you kind of fly by the seat of your trousers, I suppose. Survival mode "It’s really survival mode. You just hope that you can make enough money to stay in business until times change. "The ultimate choice is whether to subdivide your land and sell it for urban use. But that is a limited choice… once you do that, you’re done, you don’t have a farm anymore. "Water has a tremendous value in this area, it is just like oil. It is a very scarce resource and if economics come into play, it goes to the higher and better use which is urban use. "Economics rule when the water becomes too valuable to farm with. Then people are willing to pay more for the water than farming and then the farmer has to look at the possibility of selling some of his water." Listen to the radio series: Water Walks parts 1 and 2
BBC World Service Online visited Johnny Stubbs in February 2003 |
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