Archie Abrameit, the manager of the Stiles Farm Foundation, a state-owned farm of 2,900 acres near Thrall, said the parched soil thwarted the winter wheat from coming up. Farmers have no hope that the spring crops will do better, since not even wild plants are sprouting.

“We make the joke we can’t even grow weeds this winter,” Mr. Abrameit said.

As a result, farmers have found themselves playing a guessing game. Does one plant corn now and hope for rain, or wait for rain, hoping it comes in time to plant sorghum? Or wait still later and plant cotton, which can be grown until later in the summer? Some admit privately that they will plant knowing the crop will fail in hopes of collecting insurance. Others say they may not plant at all.

“The clock is ticking as far as coming up to planting time,” said Terrell Hamann, who farms 1,800 acres near Taylor, just northeast of Austin. “I change my mind about three times a day about what to do.”

Complicating the calculus for farmers and ranchers, prices for grain and beef have dropped, as people across the country have cut their spending in the economic crisis.

At the Brown Ranch in Beeville, about 85 miles southeast of San Antonio, the family is bracing for what could be a terrible year. So far, Mr. Brown and his son, Austin Brown III, have kept their 2,000 head of Angus, Hereford and Akaushi cattle watered by pumping well water into troughs, at great cost in electric bills. They have also dipped into the ranch’s savings to buy hundreds of bales of hay and hundreds of pounds cottonseed “cake,” dense protein-rich pellets, to feed the animals.

As the younger Mr. Brown spread the cottonseed cake on the ground on a recent afternoon, a hungry mob of Hereford cows chased after his truck, jostling and bumping one another. The ground was devoid of green life as far as the eye could see. The cows and their calves had devoured a towering roll of hay left for them but could find nothing to forage.