Drought Spreads Pain From Florida to Arizona

Grant Blankenship for The New York Times

Buster Haddock, an agricultural scientist at the University of Georgia, in a field where cotton never had the chance to grow.More Photos »

Published: July 11, 2011

By KIM SEVERSO

N and KIRK JOHNSON

COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days.