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<br />If energy prices were to stablize and if commodity prices were <br />to improve, the long-term transition from full-scale irrigation to <br />dryland farming, now underway, would be gradual. The economic or <br />physical life of the aquifer can be extended many years under cur- <br />rent conservation practices. As a result and until very re- <br />cently, most experts, businessmen, and farmers had viewed the trans- <br />ition phase not as a devastating or rapid adjustment experience, <br />as has been popularly portrayed, but as a 40-year period of chal- <br />lenge and test of the region's skills in adapting the new methods, <br />practices, crops, and marketing arrangements, with hardly notice- <br />able annual declines in production, agri-business volume, and other <br />activities. Dryland crop research is already under way, and the <br />West Texan is basically an optimistic and innovative entrepreneur <br />During the irrigation era, off-the-farm enterprises have <br />prospered handsomely -- farm implement dealers, supplier of other <br />farm production inputs, marketers of farm outputs, operators of <br />feedlots, cotton gins, cottonseed mills, textile mills and grain <br />elevators, irrigation pump and pipe dealers, and many others di- <br />rectly or indirectly tied to farm production. Most have felt that <br />they will continue to prosper in the long-run transition to limited <br />irrigation. Moreover, the region has other non-agricultural activ- <br />ities going for it -- electronics companies, prefab home builders, <br />still rich oil and gas fields in nearly every county, the large <br />university, the air force base. <br /> <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />- <br /> <br />11-4 <br /> <br />I <br /> <br /> <br />Arthur 0 uttle.lnc I <br />