Fighting Drought in Texas Cotton Country

What this means

NASA Earth Observatory used Landsat 8 images from September 22, 2025 and September 9, 2026 to document much drier cotton fields and playa lakes around Lubbock, Texas. Farmers interviewed by NASA reported extensive dryland-cotton losses and failing irrigation wells as the High Plains aquifer continues to decline; NASA said severe drought persisted in October despite recent rain. The article also describes NASA Acres work with local farmers and Texas Tech research on using satellite data to manage crops, groundwater and playa-lake restoration.

Official release

Source material from NASA. The wording below is the issuer’s statement.

September 22, 2025

September 9, 2026

A satellite image of farmland around Lubbock, Texas, on September 22, 2025, features a patchwork of green and brown agricultural fields and several playa lakes with varying amounts of water.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A satellite image of the same Lubbock region on September 9, 2026, appears parched, with much less green vegetation and mostly dry lakes.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A satellite image of farmland around Lubbock, Texas, on September 22, 2025, features a patchwork of green and brown agricultural fields and several playa lakes with varying amounts of water.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A satellite image of the same Lubbock region on September 9, 2026, appears parched, with much less green vegetation and mostly dry lakes.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

September 22, 2025

September 9, 2026

Fields were parched and brown, and playa lakes mostly dry, in Lubbock County in September 2026 (right) compared to September 2025 (left) in imagery captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.

For many longtime cotton farmers in the Texas High Plains, the 2026 drought sparked flashbacks to catastrophic harvests of the past. Miserably dry seasons forced farmers in America's largest cotton-producing region to abandon massive portions of their dryland crop, including 72 percent in 2022 and 66 percent in 2011.

But in some ways, farmers felt the drought in 2026 entered new territory. "This is the first year that we've had cotton completely die," said Lacy Cotter-Vardeman, a farmer based in Lubbock County whose family has worked the land there for several generations. "I was just talking to our insurance people, and they said they'd never seen this before," she said, adding that roughly 90 percent of her dryland cotton was dead.

Satellite images highlight the scale of the problem in Lubbock and adjacent counties. Brown, parched crops and vacant plots dominated the landscape on September 9, 2026, when the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured the image above (right). In contrast, much greener landscapes prevailed on September 22, 2025 (left), when the sensor captured an image of the same area during a more typical year with a relatively healthy harvest.

Rows of spindly, wilted cotton photographed in one of Cotter-Vardeman's fields in Slaton, Texas, appear stressed and near death on August 14, 2026.

Photo by Lacy Cotter-Vardeman.

Subtler signs of the drought are also visible. With groundwater growing scarce in the High Plains aquifer, many farmers in the region have started irrigating just one-half or one-third of their center-pivot fields, explained Tillery Timmons-Sims, an agricultural conservationist who owns land in Brownfield, Texas, and used to grow cotton. In the imagery, these appear as green semicircles and quarter circles.

Note also the many shallow water features known as playa lakes—sometimes called mud holes, buffalo wallows, and lagoons—scattered throughout the image. Some, like Double Lakes and Mound Lake, are fairly large, but most of the more than 19,300 playa lakes in the Texas High Plains are quite small, less than 30 acres.

Many of these ephemeral lakes were dry in September 2026, unlike the previous year. Playa lakes are critical in this water-stressed region because the clay-lined features, if active, collect rainfall and provide pathways for water to seep underground and recharge the aquifer below, the region's primary source of irrigation water. However, some 80 percent are so modified by tilling or buried with sediment that they no longer function that way.

Drought remained severe across many parts of the Texas High Plains in October 2026 despite some rain falling in recent weeks. The data depicted in the map are produced by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. NASA Earth Observatory map by Lauren Dauphin.

Farmers in this region operate along the eastern margin of the aquifer, which has declined sharply in recent decades. According to U.S. Geological Survey data, the water table across much of Lubbock County has dropped by between 25 and 100 feet since 1950, around when people began drawing large volumes of water from the aquifer to irrigate. Losses have been even more extreme (150 feet or more) in counties to the north, including Parmer, Castro, Swisher, and Briscoe.

The aquifer's long-term decline, combined with the 2026 drought, left many wells "pumping air" this summer for some of the farmers Timmons-Sims knows. "We simply don’t have groundwater to fall back on anymore," she said. Many farmers she knows thought that water might run out during the next generation; instead, it's "happening now," she said. For Cotter-Vardeman, the problem couldn't be more tangible. Many of her irrigation wells stopped working in August.

Rains in September and October, aided by a strong El Niño in the Pacific, are bringing needed moisture to the region, but they haven’t been enough, according to analysis from the U.S. Drought Monitor. "It will take about 7 inches of rain over a three-month period to 'end' the current drought," said Jonathan Case, a meteorologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and one of the Drought Monitor’s authors.

The deteriorating aquifer is one of the reasons Timmons-Sims stopped farming in 2007. She now spends most of her time searching for ways to keep farms in business, such as converting irrigated croplands to grasslands to earn water credits, developing alternative energy projects, adopting water-efficient techniques, and working with conservation organizations to plan for the long term.

Through that work, the Sandhills Area Research Association, a conservation organization she helps run, partnered with NASA Acres, a research consortium that connects farmers with NASA science to address agricultural challenges.

In August, a NASA Acres listening tour brought NASA officials to Cotter-Vardeman's farm in Slaton, a vineyard in Meadow, and parched cotton fields in Kress (below). At each stop, the conversation returned to water: how to preserve the ailing aquifer, and how farmers could manage their land in ways that would help restore playa lakes and return billions of gallons of water to the aquifer.

Farmers and NASA scientists inspect wilted cotton in Kress, Texas, during a NASA Acres listening tour on August 25, 2026.

NASA Acres / Adam Zwerner

The playa lakes around Lubbock were among the first scientific topics researchers studied after Landsat 1 launched in 1972. One early analysis by a Texas Tech geoscientist highlighted the Double Lakes playa (shown above), estimating that monitoring lakes from space would cost just a fraction of what ground surveys would.

More recently, a team of Texas Tech University researchers used a deep learning framework to identify and track changes affecting thousands of playa lakes over three decades. Their results, published in September 2026, showed that since 1995, playa lakes declined significantly in 15 of the 45 counties analyzed, highlighting the water challenges facing farmers like Cotter-Vardeman, a member of NASA Harvest's Farm Innovation Ambassador Team (FIAT).

In Texas, Timmons-Sims and the FIAT team are working to connect farmers and NASA scientists, making it easier for farmers to use NASA data to decide what and when to plant, how to use cover crops and irrigation, and how to manage sediment and playa lakes. "We're simply running out of time and water," Timmons-Sims said. "Farmers need information, innovation, optimization, and solutions—and they need it now."

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Photos by Lacy Cotter-Vardeman and Adam Zwerner. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

Landsat 8: September 22, 2025

JPEG (9.15 MB)

Landsat 8: September 9, 2026

JPEG (7.95 MB)

US Drought Monitor

JPEG (982.97 KB)

References & Resources

Better Cotton Initiative, Lacy Cotter-Vardeman and her girls. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Dryside Dispatch (2026, September 10) Space4Ag with Tillery Sims. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Economic Research Service (2025, January 8) Cotton and Wool - Cotton Sector at a Glance. Accessed October 7, 2026.

National Integrated Drought Information System, Texas. Accessed October 7, 2026.

NASA Acres (2026) On the Road with the NASA Space4Ag Tour: Listening to Agriculture Across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Accessed October 7, 2026.

NASA, Drought. Accessed October 7, 2026.

NASA DEVELOP (2025) Southern High Plains Texas Agriculture. Accessed October 7, 2026.

NASA Technical Reports Server (1973) Dynamics of playa lakes in the Texas High Plains. Accessed October 7, 2026.

NOAA, Current Drought Reduction. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Playa Lakes Joint Venture Playas. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Sandhills Area Research Association (2026, September 19) From Satellites to Soil: Bringing NASA Remote Sensing to West Texas Farms. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Texas Counties Deliver, Texas Counties Interactive Map. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Texas Water Development Board, Region O Planning Group. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Texas Parks & Wildlife, Panhandle Playa Lakes. Accessed October 7, 2026.

U.S. Drought Monitor (2026, September 29) National Drought Summary. Accessed October 7, 2026.

Release text attributed to NASA. Consult the official publication for any subsequent corrections or updates.