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some got hit again this year. Ranchers have sold off many animals they couldn't graze or afford to feed. Cattle inventory, at 97.8 million head as of July 1, is the smallest since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began a July count in 1973.
• At least one rancher is now breeding cattle with genes that trace to animals from Africa and India, where their ancestors developed natural tolerance to heat and drought.
• Ron Gill, a rancher who also heads the animal science department at Texas A&M University, said research has been under way for years to develop cattle that can withstand heat and grow on lower-quality forage.
• Last year, he started incorporating into his herd Beefmaster cattle, a cross between Brahman cattle, which originated in India, and European breeds that include

Herefords and Shorthorns. He's also experimenting with the appropriately named Hotlanders, a Texas breed developed for its heat tolerance using genetics from Senepol cows bred in the Virgin Islands.
• As ranchers replenish their livestock, the advice from experts is to breed drought tolerance into herds.
• "We're telling people, 'Regardless of what you have to buy to restock, your future breeding programs need to target this new normal and re-establish a different paradigm than what we've had in the past,'" Gill said.
• It's no different for farmers in the nation's Corn Belt, who are confronting a drought that stretches from Ohio west to California and from Texas north to the Dakotas. Only in the 1930s and the 1950s has a drought covered more of the U.S., according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
• Nearly half of the nation's corn crop is in poor or very poor condition, as well as a third of soybeans.
• The damage would be much worse without the crop science advancements of the last 40 years, said Andrew Wood, a professor of plant physiology and molecular biology at Southern Illinois University.
• "This year's just terrible, but 20 years ago these crops would have been completely burned up," said Scott, who also grows wheat and raises cattle in Ulysses, Kan. "This year we're going to grow a decent crop even with drought."
• Until a few years ago, most research was designed to improve the plant's overall resistance to a variety of threats, including insects, weeds and diseases. But the effort also helped instill drought tolerance, said Roger Elmore, extension corn specialist at Iowa State University.
• Now crop scientists want to go even further. In seed laboratories, they are devel

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