And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord (Amos 4:7-8).
This week’s paper announced that we are under mandatory water restrictions. For now, all that means is that we can only water our lawns and gardens between 8:00 P.M. and 10:00 A.M. That’s fine. It makes me cringe to see someone’s sprinkler on at 2:00 P.M. while it’s 104 degrees and the wind’s blowing 25 miles an hour anyway.
What worries me isn’t that we can’t water our lawns. It’s that our water supply is so low that we have to be told not to water our lawns.
Yesterday morning I went to visit a local farmer. On the way, I drove over the lake that supplies most of our county with water. I glanced down at the dock from which my little girl Bonnie caught her first fish. Back then, it was a floating dock. Now it sits on dry ground about twenty feet from the water.
Since October, our county has had less than 10 inches of rain. We would have had 21 in a normal year. Still, we’re better off than most of the state. Much of West Texas has had less than an inch of rain in the last ten months. Not only have the rancher’s tanks gone dry, but the water table is so low that the windmills aren’t pumping.
South and Central Texas aren’t better off. Lampasas, a town of about 6,800, is supposedly down to a month’s supply of water.
My friend Donald, the one who I went to visit yesterday, has culled his cow herd from 100 to 25. Despite his having some of the best cared for hay fields around, he’s only been able to cut a few bales this year, and there’s no grazing. He’s feeding as much hay and feed as he normally does in January. But in January, at least he had water. Yesterday he was putting a new motor on his well so that he can pump some water into his dry ponds.
Donald signed a contract to deliver 50 acres of peanuts at $650 a ton. Had he made the crop, with the rising price of inputs (seed, fertilizer, fuel), he might have done a little better than break even. But the crop probably won’t be there at harvest time, despite all the money that he’s put into it.
Donald dug his rows deep to get his peanuts as close to moisture as possible. I stooped down and tried to scratch under a plant. “You’re going to need a sharp shooter if you’re looking for water,” he said. Meanwhile, Donald’s grandson hand watered their watermelon crop, a job that took most of the day. Still, Donald doesn’t give up: “They’re giving us a small chance of rain next week; maybe it will be enough.”
While farmers across the country face another year without crop sales, high commodity prices are the big news. Every day, there’s another article claiming that farmers are “reaping the benefits of record prices.” But the reason crop prices are high is that there are no crops to sell. Farmers are going out of business all across the country; this wouldn’t be the case if they were reaping record prices.
The prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” doesn’t have the same meaning when our pantries are full. We’ve had to give the verse a broader application to make sense of it. It’s time for a more direct application. Maybe we should stop taking for granted that we will have affordable food and clean water. After all, most of the world doesn’t.