As cattle were auctioned off at the Joplin Regional Stockyards, Governor Nixon met over coffee Monday at the stockyard’s café with local ranchers and farmers. He listened to their stories about how the emergency water cost-share program has helped them and gave them an update on the program.
The same reservoirs in northern states that were blamed for last year's flooding on the Missouri River are now giving the river a boost during a severe drought.
More money is being put into an emergency program to aid farmers and ranchers battling water shortages in Missouri.
Governor Jay Nixon (D) has added $5 million to the $2 million set aside for crop and livestock producers who want to drill new wells or deepen existing ones during the ongoing drought. More than 600 applications have been sent in since the program’s announcement on Tuesday.
Junior Roberts’ cows near Billmore, Missouri, are lucky. The grass they’re grazing on just tested negative for high levels of nitrate. But Roberts says he’s not through testing his 1,400 acres, and he knows that many farmers are selling off their herds rather than pay for alternative foods for their cattle.
“You’d be better off to sell them then to turn them in on a field where they’re gonna lay down and die,” he says. “It’s a problem if that’s all they’ve got left to eat and it’s poison. It ain’t gonna do them no good. You’re gonna lose them plum completely.”
Dan Henrichs, a cattle rancher on the High Line Canal in Avondale, Colo., is also the local ditch superintendent. Most irrigation canals near his ranch have run dry
Credit Frank Morris / Harvest Public Media
Water is low in the Arkansas River in Colorado this year, making the raft trip through Royal Gorge slower, and bumpier, than normal.
Drought has set in early and hard across the Midwest, parching the Arkansas River basin. The river trickling out of the mountains is dry before it reaches some of the major agricultural uses downstream. And the drought is torching crops, sapping tourism and threatening supplies of drinking water.
