South Plains map

The Llano Estacado — the Staked Plain — is a single sheet of Ogallala Formation sand and gravel capped with caliche, covering roughly 32,000 square miles across West Texas and eastern New Mexico. It is one of the largest tablelands in North America and the flattest large surface in the United States. Coronado's men crossed it in 1541 and wrote that they could see nothing to steer by; the Comanche and Comanchero trails that followed used the few playas and springs as waypoints.

Because the surface is level and porous, no river crosses it. The Brazos and the Red both rise in the escarpment breaks on the eastern edge rather than on the plain itself, and the only running water most of these counties see is in a draw after a storm. The land tilts gently up toward New Mexico: about 2,500 feet at the foot of the Caprock in Garza County, more than 3,500 feet on the state line in Cochran and Yoakum counties. Lubbock, in the middle, is a little over 3,200 feet.

The eastern boundary is a physical one. The Caprock Escarpment runs some 200 miles north to south, from the Canadian River breaks down past Motley, Dickens and Garza counties, dropping anywhere from 200 to 1,000 feet in a few miles of red canyons and mesas. Above it is farmland on a grid; below it is ranch country cut by draws. Every road that leaves the plain to the east has to climb or descend it — US-62/82 between Crosbyton and Dickens, US-380 east of Post, US-70 east of Floydada.

The town of Post sits right at the foot of it. C. W. Post, who made his money in breakfast cereal, laid out the colony in 1907, sold farms to settlers, and then tried to break the drought by detonating dynamite along the rim of the escarpment in the belief that concussion would bring rain. It did not, but the town stayed and is now the Garza County seat.

These counties form the largest contiguous cotton-growing area in the world, and Lubbock is its capital: the gins, the co-ops, the compresses, the seed breeders and the agricultural research at Texas Tech are all here. Cotton works on the South Plains because the growing season is long enough, the autumn is dry enough to strip and harvest cleanly, and the soil holds what water it gets. Sorghum, wheat, peanuts and, on the sandier ground west of Brownfield, more cotton fill the rest of the acreage; cattle feedyards around Plainview and Hereford take the grain.

Water is the constraint. There is no river to dam, so irrigation comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, pumped up through centre-pivot systems that draw the green circles you see from any aeroplane. The aquifer refills mainly through playas — roughly 20,000 shallow clay-floored basins scattered across the Southern High Plains, each a few acres, filling after a heavy rain and slowly leaking downward. They are also the region's wetlands, and the reason ducks and cranes winter in a place with no lakes. Pumping has drawn the water table down a long way since irrigation took hold in the 1950s, and most counties now run on a mix of groundwater rules, dryland farming and, increasingly, wind leases.