Lindsay Coker left Houston and came back to Texola. Her brother did too. Their parents needed help on the family place in Beckham County, right where Oklahoma thins out against the Texas line, running Angus cow-calf pairs alongside cotton, wheat, and hay. Coming home meant leaving careers. It meant choosing the work your body remembers even when your résumé says otherwise.
Her father had always taught her not to overstock. Keep your numbers honest. Rotate your pastures so the grass has time to come back before you put cattle on it again. Pregnancy-check every cow so you're not carrying animals that aren't producing. Coker learned these things the way ranch kids do, watching what worked and what the land punished you for.
By the time an OSU Extension report found her in the spring of 2023, the weather had been turning for three years. Producers across the Southern Plains were still rebuilding herds from the severe 2010–2015 drought when a flash drought hit western Texas in 2020, and the ground around Texola never caught up. Then 2022 brought the worst of it. Texas cattle numbers dropped to levels not seen in decades. No rain, no grass, no choice.
Coker was doing everything right. Rotating pastures on schedule. Culling older cattle and unbred cows to cut expenses. Buying supplemental forage and protein cake, the concentrated feed that keeps cattle alive when pasture can't. It was expensive, and it was supposed to be temporary.
"This past winter, we had the leanest pastures we've ever started with," she told the extension reporter that spring, "and we had to supplement more with forage, cake and protein."
Her father's rule about not overstocking? "That has gotten a little more challenging."
Listen to that word, challenging, doing all the work in that sentence. Keeping your numbers honest is a covenant between a family and their land. You take what the grass can give and no more. But when the grass gives nothing for three years straight, the covenant breaks from the other side. The knowledge is still good. The conditions have outrun it.
Then something green appeared. Spring 2023, and Coker could see it in her pastures.
"Everything is starting to green up, and that helps our mood and outlook. I hope this is the start of the turnaround. You've just got to have hope and faith that things will work out."
That green-up didn't hold. Five of the past six years brought La Niña winters to Coker's part of Oklahoma, each one warmer and drier than it should have been, each one pulling the moisture back out of whatever the previous season managed to put down. By February 2026, soil in Beckham County sat below the 10th percentile for moisture. A late January storm wet the topsoil. Underneath, the ground stayed dry.
The cruelty compounds after the selling. Sell the oldest calves first because they bring the best price. Then the younger ones. Then the breeding stock you swore you'd never touch. Carry the debt from supplemental feed into another dry season. Watch the pasture you rested all summer come back thin or not at all. Start the next year leaner, with fewer animals and less margin. And when rain finally comes, discover that replacing those animals costs far more than what you got for them. By 2024, a 500-pound calf was selling for over three dollars a pound, up from $2.35 the year before. Cull cows went for a dollar a pound. The math only runs one direction.
The genetics bred into a herd over generations, though, the careful selection that makes one family's cattle suited to one family's land, cannot be purchased back at auction. That knowledge lives in the animals themselves, and once they're loaded onto a trailer, it's gone.
Lindsay Coker came home to Texola because her family needed her and the land was the life she chose. Three years into a drought that wouldn't break, she stood in a greening pasture and said the words anyone who has loved a dry place knows by heart.
It is now March 2026. The drought is in its sixth year. Coker hasn't appeared in print since that spring. I don't know what her herd looks like today, how many head she's running, whether the pastures she rotated so carefully ever recovered. Beckham County is still in drought. The soil is still below the 10th percentile. Faith depletes like any other resource when the land won't answer it back.
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The $23.6 billion toll: A December 2025 federal drought assessment documents the cumulative economic damage across Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas from 2020 through 2024, including the structural reality that herds hadn't recovered from the previous drought before this one began.
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Droughts lasting longer now: Climate researchers found that severe Southern Plains droughts this century are persisting longer than the historical once-a-decade pattern, leaving rangelands and water supplies with no recovery window before the next one hits.
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Governor Abbott's renewed proclamation: Texas renewed its drought disaster proclamation in February 2026, with 69% of the state under moderate to exceptional drought, up from 41% a year earlier.
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The restocking trap ahead: Oklahoma State University economist Derrell Peel warns that ranchers who liquidated herds face a slower and more expensive rebuilding process than after the 2011–2013 drought, because elevated cattle prices that reward sellers punish anyone trying to buy back in.