Excited to share this with the family. We got the entire National Geographic Magazine archive in order to find this. Well worth it. So for those that don’t know, this is my Grandfather, Larry Shaw, who was featured in the magazine back on November 1979. Thanks to Uncle Larry Don Shaw, for purchasing this!

The text reads:

“We’ve got to live on faith. If we don’t get the rain, we don’t make it.” During a dry spring Larry Shaw watches the wind eat away at his 2,000 acres of cotton fields near Knott, Texas. While he waits for rain to bring planting time, he digs out an implement called a sand fighter, designed to protect young shoots from burning by covering the sand with a layer of earth.

The blowing sand has no more respect for the living than for the dead in the town cemetery, which Larry helped excavate–though he never found the long-lost grave of his infant brother.

Throughout the America’s Great Plains the arrival of the cowboy and his cattle in the mid-19th century, along with poor farming techniques practiced by homesteaders, denuded millions of acres. The legacy of overuse blew in with the winds of the drought-stricken 1930′s, creating the catastrophic dust bowl. Today a different crisis faces the nation’s arid West — the depletion of limited groundwater at an alarming rate. A resident of Phoenix, Arizona, for example, uses an average of 150 gallons of water a day, compared with less than four gallons for an inhabitant of rural African lands.