Water is life, but we sure don't act like it
January 14, 2025
Water is life. This simple statement has a profound meaning to me. Our ranch lies on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert by a 100 miles or so. South and West Texas are no stranger to droughts. It’s not uncommon for droughts to occur here. We live in a climate of feast or famine, meaning it either rains too much or not enough. However, the latest iteration of years-long drought and increasing usage has pushed us closer to a crisis. Our streams and rivers are drying up, exploitation of groundwater and ever expanding urbanization eating up landscapes and turning them into concrete. It’s no wonder why the water cycle is broken.
I have personally observed ponds and streams on our ranch dry up that no one in their 70 year life history has seen or heard of being dry. I have seen our beautiful Live Oak trees that are hundreds of years old die, the tall Cedar Elm trees that once lined our creek are gone and the abundant Hackberry motts have mostly died out. My intuition and observations tell me that the root causes are clearer than ever - overgrazing our rangelands, tilling and then leaving barren crop fields, planting grasses like Bermuda that are ill adapted to our changing climate and the constant expansion of urban development. Have we forgotten the basic science of the water cycle? The movement of water on, above and below the Earth’s surface. Our human activities have impacted the water cycle, such as where it is stored, how it moves and how clean it is. Climate change is also affecting the water cycle, increasing the rate of evaporation and precipitation. In the Western part of Texas the yearly evaporation rate can exceed 90 inches. Where I live our yearly average precipitation is 18 inches. Simple math tells me that if we don’t store that water where nature intended we will lose it to evaporation. In fact, recent data show that the yearly evaporation rate in Texas has been increasing since 1981 due to increasing average daily temperatures particularly in the summer months. The data also shows that the precipitation in Texas has not significantly decreased overall, but the intensity of rainfall events is increasing, leading to more extreme weather events such as flooding.
Growing up on this ranch since I was born has afforded me the opportunity and privilege of witnessing the changes over the past 38 years. When I was in my early youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s this environment looked and acted different than what it is today. The Parker Creek flowed almost year-round. I vividly remember getting in the aluminum boat and starting at the North end of the ranch and being able to float all of the way to the South end of the ranch. The water was clear and clean enough to swim in. Our summers days were spent floating on a tube where the big hole is the near the road. I could put my feet down and feel the cold water rushing up from springs in the ground. The Parker Creek no longer flows, except briefly for a few days during large seasonal rain events. It’s a shadow of what it once was. This has changed the entire dynamic of the landscape. The huge Elm trees that once lined the creek are gone. There were hundreds of them on our ranch and during the Fall they were covered with millions of Monarch butterflies. We rarely see Monarchs now other than the passerby just floating overhead during their long migration.
My father tilled and planted the hundred acre field at the back end of our ranch in winter oats every year. He tilled it with an old orange Allis Chalmers tractor just as his great-grandfather had with a team of horses. My dad worked offshore on the oil rigs when I was a kid, so his schedule was erratic. He would often be gone for one or two weeks at a time. This left my mother, Diana, to take care of duties around the ranch, which included tilling the field to prepare for planting the oats. My younger sister, Julia, and I would sit on the floorboard of the tractor while mom tilled the field with an old sixteen foot tandem disc plow. The a/c and heater had quit years earlier so my dad pulled out the windows effectively making it an open cab tractor. It was a long, dusty day to say the least. Our heavy, dark clay soil sticks to you like concrete when mixed with sweat. It was miserable as a small child. My great-grandfather, whom we called Papa (pronounced as Paw-paw), once asked me how long it took to plow the field with my mother. I told him that it took a few days, and he laughingly recalled that it would take he and his brothers a month to till and plant the field with horses and some of the relic farm equipment laying around the ranch. It dawned on me as an adult that same hundred acre field had now been tilled for at least 125 years, if not more. I finally convinced my dad around the year 2010 to plant the field back to grass. This was after an entire decade of decreasing fall and winter rains that resulted in 8 out of 10 oat crops failing. My dad didn’t buy crop insurance, as many other farmers began to do at that time. Thus, it resulted in big financial losses for our small family ranch. Many of the fields I drive past in this part of Texas have probably also been tilled and farmed for over a hundred years. The bottom of the fence posts are exposed from erosion and the loss of topsoil. The soil has been mined of all of its nutrients requiring farmers to use ever greater amounts of fertilizer and nonetheless their yields continue to decline. Where there were earthworms and soil that was alive it is “dead.” It has literally become a substrate for growing monoculture crops. The fertilizer and the herbicides have killed everything. We can’t even grow wildflowers anymore, because even the pastures have been converted to exotic grasses and given the same fertilizer/herbicide treatment. All in the name of production and yield so that we can make another almighty dollar. The full 100 acre field is now planted back to native grasses, even though much of it has been taken over by KR bluestem, which thrives in poor, dry soils.
The problem is that I don’t see enough change happening. There are some people doing great things with water - Zach Weiss, Pete Van Dyck, Darren Doherty (Regrarians) and there are more. We need change at massive scale. We need to start taking action on our landscapes. Water is critical to our health and life - let’s start acting like it. The past is what it is. That is the way it was and we need to move forward with a new way of thinking. We have done so much on our journey with this piece of land. Some of the techniques and projects have worked in the name of regeneration, and some have not. It’s a complex issue and the best way to attack complexity is one small piece at a time. For me, that is regenerating the 400 acres of land that I steward.
On the next blog I will share some of the things that worked and some that didn’t. As always, thanks for reading.
— Travis
