Heat advisory covers Cooke County; USDA counts near-full fieldwork week in Texas, Oklahoma

The National Weather Service office in Fort Worth placed Cooke County, Gainesville included, under a heat advisory for Friday, July 31, 2026, forecasting heat-index values as high as 110 and cautioning that people working outdoors face a raised risk of heat illness. Federal crop records showed most of the prior week was suitable for fieldwork in Texas and Oklahoma. The advisory covers a county where the most recent federal agricultural census counted 2,188 farms.

That fieldwork figure comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Its crop progress report for the week ending July 26 listed 5.9 days suitable for fieldwork in Texas and 6.3 in Oklahoma. The measure tracks how much of a week's conditions allowed field operations. The agency was still logging progress on cotton, sorghum, corn and winter wheat. Those counts are statewide totals, and the report does not separate out Cooke County or the Oklahoma counties across the Red River.

Alerts on the Oklahoma side of Texoma carried a higher level of warning the same day. The weather service office in Norman placed Madill, Thackerville, Kingston and Ardmore under an extreme heat warning for July 31, with heat-index values expected to reach 114. The two offices issued different alerts for the same date.

A joint USDA and NOAA publication described what the weather was doing to crops. The Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin dated July 28 reported that hot and frequently dry conditions had drawn down topsoil moisture and added stress on crops. The same bulletin credited that weather with helping small grains reach maturity and with easing harvest.

Weather service climate records for Gainesville put the normal July high at 93.5 degrees over the 1991-2020 averaging period, with August at 94.3. Heat index is a different measure. It folds humidity in alongside air temperature, so the figure quoted in an advisory is not what a thermometer would read.

The scale of farming exposed to those conditions locally shows up in USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture, the most recent full count. It recorded 513,278 acres in farms in Cooke County. Forage accounted for 64,346 of those acres. The census also counted 92,296 cattle and calves in the county.

The records reviewed for this report carry no county-level tally of workable field days for late July, and neither weather alert estimates damage to local crops or livestock. No heat-illness cases connected to farm work appear in the documents.