Word: semiarid
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...California's semiarid desert climate, no one expects much moisture from May to October, but the months of December through March are generally rainy, with January the wettest. Not this season. From Oct. 1 through the beginning of February, only 5 in. of rain fell vs. an average of 28 in. for that period. Reservoirs are half full at best; some are empty. At Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, pumping for groundwater has opened a half-mile-long, 12-ft.- deep, 4-ft.-wide crack close to a runway used by the space shuttles. Enough trees have died...
Mathers estimates that at one time there were between 125 and 150 homestead families on his 50,000-acre spread, each trying to live with a few cows and sheep and harboring vain hopes that crops that sprout so effortlessly in Illinois would do the same in semiarid Montana, which gets less than 15 in. of rain annually. They are all gone now, tiny homes fallen in, schoolhouses vanished, everything blown away by the same winds that lofted the sandy soil as far as the Atlantic seaboard in the 1930s. A few of the homestead titles are held by descendants...
Critics of sodbusting, as the increasingly common practice of slicing grazing lands into wheat farms is called, say that most of the marginal land of the Great Plains cannot support commercial exploitation. With less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, the region is semiarid. These marginal soils, where they are not too rocky or saline, are often too sandy for farming or are packed with calcium and lime. When overturned by plow blades, valuable topsoil only a few inches thick becomes vulnerable to wind and rain erosion; once gone, it takes decades to replace. The sodbusters are either...
...coal would wipe out the present glut of the fuel and help lift production from its current level of only about 650 million tons last year to the 1.2 billion-ton 1985 goal that Carter set for the industry in his first energy address two years ago. In the semiarid reaches of the intermountain West, where treasure troves of coal lie almost on the surface just waiting to be scraped up and hauled away, whole new towns would have to be built to house the workers employed at mines and synfuel plants. Residents of the region regard such a boom...
...venture was such a success that Carlsberg opened posher Stallion Springs Horse Ranch in semiarid land north of Los Angeles. Campers at Stallion are less interested in roughing it than riding it, drawn by the park's boarding stables, corrals and an equestrian show ring that seats 600. Though he also runs a profitable real estate and construction company, Carlsberg is concerned, he says, about "retaining land as much as possible in its natural beauty...