June 26, 2026 Editor, The News-Gazette: Our Extension agent, Tom Stanley, cares to warn us of looming “extreme drought.” We should prepare for this threat to our routine.
The Western U.S. is experiencing the same warning, but the upper Colorado River water shed is also graded as “exceptional,” which is worse than “extreme.”
Disaster in the dirt and inadequate irrigation from the sky is a crisis Americans haven’t faced since the drought and Dustbowl of the early 1930s ... almost 100 years ago.
In Grand Junction, Colorado, back in 2016, a USDA agronomist, speaking at a corn farmers’ meet, offered a warning about raising corn. He pointed out that corn is being grown on seriously depleted soils throughout the Midwest, noting that use of synthetic fertilizer and herbicides has dominated corn agriculture, further commenting that in Indiana the soil no longer provided nutrients for corn plants: the sole purpose of dirt was to hold the plant erect.
Meanwhile, the global cattle industry holds herds of “cows” numbering over 1.554 billion head, a biomass roughly equivalent to the global human population of 8.2 billion. The combined consumption of “cows” eating foodstocks like corn, and humans eating both “cows” and corn products, has seriously overstressed the global food supply. Thus, a serious “extreme” or “exceptional” drought forecast bodes ill for most of us.
The war with Iran and rising tensions among the three largest superpowers might trigger an atomic exchange which will dramatically change our future, but the combined strain on the global food supply, by severe drought, is the more fearful Armageddon.
What will become of us? DON HENKE Goshen
