Wichita ? Dighton farmer Don Hineman usually moves his cattle to green pastures by mid-April.

Not this year.

“If I did that this year, I’m afraid they’d starve to death,” he said.

Last week, Hineman sold some of his cow-calf pairs in what he calls a “pre-emptive move” to trim his herd. If the current dry spell continues much longer, he figures more ranchers will liquidate their herds flooding the market and driving down cattle prices.

Hineman is strictly a dryland farmer. His winter wheat is barely surviving. He’s not sure now whether there will be enough moisture in the ground to plant his dryland corn and sunflowers this spring.

“The wheat crop is in trouble. We don’t have enough subsoil moisture to have realistic prospects for summer crops. And the grass is not greening up for the cows,” he said. “All of that together is starting to weigh on people’s attitudes and dispositions.”

Kansas is coming out of its 28th driest winter since 1895 with the state averaging about 66 percent of normal moisture in the seven-month period between September and March, state climatologist Mary Knapp said.

But those statewide numbers do not come close to reflecting the misery in parched western Kansas, particularly in the southwest, where precipitation during those same seven months has totaled just 38 percent of normal.

Kansas was unusually wet in the 1990s, excepting the dry winter of 1996-97.

“We have to endure the dry period because it is the other side of the coin,” she said. “The biggest concern is that it is going to have a negative impact at a time people don’t need that, with the economy in the state already under pressure.”

Conditions over all of Kansas, except the eastern edge, were rated from abnormally dry to severe drought by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service.

Kansas has hovered right at the official trigger level on the so-called Palmer Drought Index that would activate the state’s Drought Response Team, said Hank Ernst, spokesman for the Kansas Water Office.

But the director of the Kansas Water Authority, Al LeDoux, also has discretionary authority to initiate the drought response team. That decision could come as early as Monday following an inspection tour this weekend of drought-stressed areas.

Sen. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, has asked for the action because of drought conditions in the Cimarron and Upper Arkansas river basins.

An official state drought response would allow pumping from reservoirs, and facilitate use of equipment and manpower, Ernst said.

Already the Kansas Water Office has warned 134 vulnerable Kansas communities and water districts to use their contingency plans should the drought last into summer.