- ELKHART, Kan. (AP) - Warren
Bowker's combine kicks up a cloud of dust as he runs it nearly full speed
across his thin stands of winter wheat. The machine almost touches the
parched ground as it tries to cut stunted wheat that grew only a few inches
tall.Bowker's brother, Shaun, waves him in. Moments later they stare glumly
at the combine's flat tire. Shaun Bowker uses his cell phone to call a
repair shop, which says someone will be out soon. After all, there isn't
much business these days.
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- It's been nearly a year since much of western Kansas
has gotten substantial rain of even up to an inch, and the southwest corner
has been hardest hit.
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- The drought has devastated the wheat crop now being
harvested and spurred widespread selling off of cattle herds, as farmers
become increasingly desperate to find enough feed and water to carry them
through the summer grazing season.
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- Rural farm economies are hurting and even the wildlife
is struggling to survive. The Bowker brothers are thankful to have anything
left at all to harvest.
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- "You feel good, but you feel bad you are one of
the few cutting," Shaun Bowker says. "Everybody around is burned
off."
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- Poor crops are the least of their worries in this drought.
Before the end of the month, the Bowkers will round up their cattle out
of the Cimarron National Grassland and ship them off for sale, liquidating
in one day what took them 10 years to build.
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- "We are going to dump the whole thing. We aren't
going to fight it," Warren Bowker says.
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- Last week, forestry officials ordered all 100 farmers
with permits to graze government lands to remove their grazing cattle
from the drought-stressed grass. Usually 5,000 cattle feed off the national
grassland; 3,200 are on it now, and all must leave before the end of June.
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- "The grass and vegetation is so stressed so severely
that to graze it will be detrimental," says Cimarron National Grassland
district manager Joe Hartman. "If we don't take care of those plants,
they could be adversely hurt."
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- Weather records dating back to 1913 show that never
has there been less precipitation here than now. Even the Dust Bowl days
of the 1930s logged more rain than this year, says Morton County Extension
agent Tim Jones.
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- The big, black dust clouds of that era haven't repeated
because much of the land has been put into the Conservation Reserve Program,
a government program that pays farmers not to plant their cropland. But
at times, big drifts of dirt blow across state highways so thickly that
for a moment it seems like dusk. The drifting soil piles up along fence
rows.
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- Activity at the Elkhart Co-op grain elevator - or lack
of it - illustrates the troubles.
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- Manager Larry Dunn says his seven elevators usually
take in 3.2 million bushels of wheat during harvest. This year they hope
to collect 500,000 to 600,000 bushels. He figures 70 percent of the planted
acres were abandoned long before harvest began.
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- "It is a downward spiraling effect," Dunn says.
"It is to the point it can get easily depressing for employees who
have to hear it all the time."
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- Roughly 2,800 Kansas farmers have filed insurance claims
for this year's crop, collecting $24 million so far even as losses mount
with the start of the harvest, according to figures compiled by the federal
Department of Agriculture's risk management agency.
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- Those figures only reflect claims paid, and the agency
has a backlog. They don't include damage from a recent weekend hail storm
that caused an estimated $6 million in damages to wheat crops.
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- This year's wheat crop in Kansas is insured for $645
million, and the money paid out so far is mostly for abandoned acres, says
Rebecca Davis, the agency's director of the Topeka regional office.
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- In Washington, drought aid proposals are expected to
be discussed when lawmakers later this summer begin writing food and farm
spending bills for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
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- "We are all trying to stay optimistic, but it is
kind of bleak," says Pam Pate of Ben Pate Agency in Elkhart, noting
that about 75 percent of the farmers who bought insurance from the agency
have already filed claims for abandoned acres.
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- "It will turn around and get good again," she
says. "We are hoping prices will come back up. It will rain, or snow,
again. We are tough out here. We survive."
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- Elkhart has been through droughts before. Businesses
come and go, but it will be mainly farmers who are forced to quit.
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- "A lot of our customers have no wheat left to cut,"
says Tim Predmore, service manager at a John Deere farm equipment dealership.
"As far as we are concerned, there is no harvest."
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