Galveston County approves burn ban amid drought conditions, officials say<\/a><\/p>\nAtkinson Farms has been around since the 1960s in Spring. Through the decades, they’ve learned a lot and adjusted to the challenges that come with the ever-changing weather.<\/p>\n
Other farmers also tell ABC13 they’ve learned to deal with it in order to stay a functioning business.<\/p>\n
“It’s August; we expect it to be hot, we expect it to be dry. We water everything that a lot of other people cannot…we have seven big wells that we water out of,” Atkinson Farms Co-Owner Mike Atkinson said. “I’m always concerned. When you get rain, it gets a lot easier…but here’s the thing: if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Sometimes it gets hard…it gets hot, it gets hard…we’re ok though.”<\/p>\n
They have their routine down. Atkinson says he’s seen droughts and cold weather challenges plenty in his time. Something he says comes with the territory.<\/p>\n
“Eight or nine months out of the year it will be really good – it’s the other three months you have to deal with,” said Atkinson.<\/p>\n
The lack of rain the region has seen and expects in the coming weeks creates roadblocks for people who live off soil moisture, like farmers.<\/p>\n
“It’s taxing on the soil, on the plants, and on our team that takes care of them,” Finca Tres Robles executive director Tommy Garcia-Prats said. “Try to be as conscientious on trying to be as strategic as possible of how we manage our growing season to deal with the challenges.”<\/p>\n
Finca Tres Robles is an urban farm in the heart of the Second Ward.<\/p>\n
“This time of year we call the inferno,” Garcia-Prats said. “If you’re born and raised in Houston like me, you understand the summer is another level of heat.”<\/p>\n
Garcia-Prats is the executive director there and says it’s concerning when you hear there isn’t rain in the forecast and a lot of hot days ahead.<\/p>\n
“We see the soil cracking, and it gets hard, and that’s stressful on the plants. Thankfully, we have some irrigation that helps us push through these times that are really dry when we’re not getting water from above,” Garcia-Prats said.<\/p>\n
His team said they work to be strategic with what they grow in this season to minimize their loss when the inevitable dry issues arise.<\/p>\n
Garcia-Prats said in the meantime, they’ll work to figure out how much irrigation they can use that makes sense financially. His team said sponsors helped them purchase a rain catchment system that stores all the rainwater from the gutters. The large bins can hold 10,000 gallons of water to use for irrigation or other needs.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPRING, Texas (KTRK) — While the drought density map doesn’t show Southeast Texas in a drought, ABC13’s weather…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[143313,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-410271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-143313","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}