"Insight: The Great Northern Migration -- Of U.S. Cattle"

"For more than a century, through a dozen dry spells when lakes disappeared and the land died, thousands of cows from the Swenson Land & Cattle Co have roamed the fields of Texas. Yet the drought currently ravaging the southern Plains has done what the Dust Bowl could not: chased them off this land and driven them more than 600 miles north to Nebraska."

"Now, as the worst drought in a century stretches into its second year, these ranchers and many of their peers are herding their animals in record numbers to the Cornhusker State and other points north, in search of grazing land that is not parched - a shift that is fueling a dramatic economic and cultural reshaping of the U.S. livestock industry.

'If we're going to survive, we have to go north,' says Dennis Braden, general manager of Swenson Land & Cattle Co in Stamford, Texas, about 170 miles west of Dallas. 'We have to go.'"

P.J. Huffstutter and Theopolis Waters report for Reuters January 31, 2012.

SEE ALSO:

"Water Trucked To Nearly Bone-Dry Texas Town" (AP)