Lubbock farmer says about 90% of her dryland cotton died in the 2026 drought

The thing the Landsat pair cannot tell you is whether a brown field was abandoned or killed outright. An optical image records how green the ground is. It does not record why, and that question is what sets the account of 2026 apart from the droughts of 2011 and 2022 ^[1]. As a measure of how much worse this year looked, the pair is a fair test. The same instrument photographed the same ground on dates 13 days apart on the calendar ^[6][7][23], so the season is held roughly constant and only the year changes. NASA describes 2025 as a more typical year with a relatively healthy harvest ^[7].

The evidence that 2026 broke the pattern comes from Cotter-Vardeman's farm. "This is the first year that we've had cotton completely die," she said ^[3]. "I was just talking to our insurance people, and they said they'd never seen this before," she said ^[4]. The insurers' view reaches the record only through her. NASA's account does not include a 2026 abandonment rate for the region or any insurance claims data. Her figure of roughly 90 percent ^[5] also counts something different from the regional ones. It measures dead plants on one operation. The regional figures measure the share of dryland crop abandoned across the country's largest cotton-producing region ^[1][2].

Dryland fields get no irrigation, so the failing wells are a separate thread from the dead cotton. On the irrigated side the record is firmer. Farmers here work the eastern margin of the High Plains aquifer ^[20]. In Parmer, Castro, Swisher and Briscoe counties to the north, USGS data show the water table has fallen 150 feet or more since 1950 ^[13]. Tillery Timmons-Sims, an agricultural conservationist who owns land in Brownfield and used to grow cotton ^[21], said many farmers now irrigate only a half or a third of each center-pivot field. In the imagery those fields appear as green semicircles and quarter circles ^[8]. "We simply don't have groundwater to fall back on anymore," she said ^[15]. Many farmers she knows had expected the water to run out in the next generation. Instead, she said, it is "happening now" ^[17].

Recharge has its own limit. The Texas High Plains has more than 19,300 playa lakes, most smaller than 30 acres ^[9]. When they are active, these clay-lined basins collect rain and give it a path down to the aquifer ^[11]. Some 80 percent have been so altered by tilling, or so buried in sediment, that they no longer work that way ^[11]. That leaves roughly 3,900 that can ^[22]. Many were dry in September 2026, unlike the year before ^[10].

Autumn rain is arriving, helped by a strong El Nino, but the U.S. Drought Monitor's analysis says it has not been enough ^[18]. Jonathan Case, a NASA meteorologist based at Marshall Space Flight Center who co-authors the Drought Monitor, said: "It will take about 7 inches of rain over a three-month period to 'end' the current drought" ^[19].

I think the case for putting 2026 in a different risk category is stronger for the groundwater than for the cotton. The aquifer decline is a USGS measurement covering several counties over 76 years ^[12][24], and this summer it reached working wells ^[14]. The dead-crop claim will need regional loss figures before anyone can rank it against 2011 and 2022.