Good luck and hope yall get some. Shoot hope WE get some. Getting a little dry here at Needville but Shiner is dry as a powderhouse. We got a good rain back in July but it hasn't rained a drop since. We got a flush of green grass got up about 3-4 inches tall and now totally dry brown and dead. Even the bullnettles are dying. Good advice I read on here said look at the cows not at the grass. Good news is cows are butterball fat don't really know how though, or (ominously) for how long :( All that nubbin corn and coloradograss has been baled up there since I was talking about it last month. Luckily we have about all the hay we should need and now at about 4 acres per head so hopefully that will help, but we will need rain pretty soon or be in serious trouble.
What we need is a good Gulf Storm. I was commenting to a neighbor the other day who I was baling for that we just don't get rainmaking gulf storms anymore. Not the kind we used to get when I was row cropping and trying to pick cotton right after I graduated, back in the 80's and early 90's. Many a time I would run the picker all night in the wind of an approaching gulf storm until it started raining and then call it quits. Shoot, we used to defoliate on Aug 1 most years and be picking by Aug 7 but there are guys around here who haven't even defoliated yet. In the 80's we were lucky to get the cotton picked before at least one good mess of thunderstorms or a little gulf storm would knock us out a week or two with 5, sometimes 10 inches of rain. I remember one storm that came in over us, moved up to Arkansas, a front pushed it back out over us into the gulf, it strengthened up again, came over us a third time to Ark, front pushed it over us a fourth time into the gulf, strengthened again, moved north into Ok and then finally got picked up by the next front and off into Tn. We got about 15 inches outta that one. Not anymore. Now we just get these killer monsters that cover half the gulf (if not the whole gulf) and come at us at Cat. 5 or close to it. No good ol' rainmakers like we used to get. Course when I was in the cotton business, I cussed those storms plenty but different priorities then. But that's EXACTLY why we didn't DARE wait til the middle of
September to pick cotton. You wouldn't have had any cotton to pick!
Sure hope we all get some rain. Good luck and God bless! OL JR :)
