"You have a choice: Spend money to buy hay or spend money on fuel to get hay. We may be looking for hay again in October," Gardner writes in a first-person piece for Yahoo News.
The Embarras flows north to south, meandering through seven Illinois counties that have all been designated as "extreme" drought by the federal government. Like more than 1,500 counties across the country, water along the river is sparse or non-existent.
"The ponds are gone. They're just big craters now. The trees are dropping leaves, diminishing what little shade they have," Gardner writes. "Dust billows up like a giant wave, rising through barren locust trees when the cows head to pasture."
He said that this May he improved two fields by spreading turkey manure on them -- and it worked, sort of. They were last fields to turn brown in the drought.
"For more than 100 years, someone from our family has worked this dry ground," he writes. "Every decision we make carries risk of failure of ending that tradition."
Gardner's story is one of undoubtedly thousands of drought-related anecdotes from across the United States. There's plenty of misery to spread around: On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture named 218 additional counties to its tally of natural disaster areas, raising the number of counties nationwide with drought designations to 1,584 in 32 states. And -- as millions of Americans have learned this summer -- if it's not the drought that's problematic, it's the drought's ugly cousin: the heat wave. More
