These were supposed to be long-term cash cows that balanced out uneconomic dry gas fields.

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Then Lanworth knits in observations made at ground level by four pairs of people who travel the back roads of America taking notes on how far along crops are or how wet or dry the fields might be.

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New wells will fail to plug the gap left as older fields dry up, despite the investment that 2008's higher prices encouraged.

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After such a wet year, the ongoing lack of either warm or dry weather means that many fields remain waterlogged and unworkable.

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Mr Kloppers said the writedown on the Fayetteville assets was also a reflection of BHP's decision to change course and shift drilling from dry gas to liquid-rich fields.

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The untended fields and the warm and dry summer have combined to provide a splendid breeding-ground for the swarms of locusts.

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Weiss believes this climate change initiated a mass migration away from dry-land farming to the creation of irrigated fields along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, allowing the people to build some of the earliest institutions of civilization.

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This year, he got his crop into the ground by late April, but dry conditions are now causing damage and reducing the number bushels his fields will produce.

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