In 2012 cattle, calves and dairy made up 78.6 percent of New Mexico’s farm receipts. Hay to feed them was the next-largest component of the state’s ag economy at 4.3 percent. Pecans were next at 2.7 percent, and our famous chile made up 1.6 percent of farm receipts. Source: USDA ERS In the background, you …
Poking in the garden this morning, I’d never have guessed without actual rain gauge data that we just finished a wet month. It’s really dry out there. But drought is a funny thing, eh? 0.55 inches (1.4 cm) of rain at our house in May was the first above-average month since November. My total …
The Four Corners is a very big, very arid, and very complicated place.
The aptly named “Little Water,” on the Navajo Nation in northwest New Mexico. The weather station at Canyon de Chelly, which looks like it’s about 30 miles away across the border in Arizona, has recorded 1.52 inches (3.86 cm) of rain so far in 2014, which is less than half of mean precip through May …
Kyle Mittan had some nice straight talk recently in the Tucson Weekly from the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal about Arizona’s projections that it’ll need another million acre feet per year of water by 2060: “A million acre-feet is a lot of water,” she said. “But is that the right number, or is that symbolic …
Inspired by these insanely cool California drought visualizations from Circle of Blue, here’s a drought history in New Mexico over the last 14 years:
In Albuquerque, we frequently tear down our old Route 66 motels, but keep their signs:
This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico. If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when …
I had work to do this morning, but this happened and I couldn’t very well not go watch: It’s an environmental pulse flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, creeping down a channel built in 2008 to provide spawning habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. This is the fourth consecutive very dry year …
From the morning paper: New Mexico’s current drought, with dwindling water supplies and increasing wildfire risk, is a taste of our future under climate change, according to a sweeping new federal report released Tuesday. While climate’s natural ups and downs are playing a major role in our current drought, rising greenhouse gases increase the odds …
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