We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
The U.S. Drought Monitor is a map released every Thursday, showing parts of the United States that are experiencing drought conditions. For some time now, Blaine County has been in the red, coding at D3 for extreme drought conditions.
According to reports from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), Blaine County just experienced its 56th driest April on record over the past 128 years. Likewise, the period from January through April 2022 was the 16th driest period to date over the same number of years. In response to this information, a Farm Services Agency spokesperson recently said, "The situation is pretty dire. We're locked in a D3 drought."
Produced jointly by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Drought Monitor has been a team effort since its inception in 1999. The map uses five classifications: abnormally dry (D0), showing areas that may be going into or are coming out of drought; and four levels of drought: moderate (D1), severe (D2), extreme (D3), and exceptional (D4).
Under the influence of D3 conditions, soil in Blaine County has large cracks, and fields are bare and brown. Furthermore, many of the coulees that capture and hold spring run-off are dry, which means that producers are hauling water for livestock and buying supplemental feed or culling cattle and selling early.
Although weather, disease, pests, and multiple other risk factors have always posed challenges to farmers and ranchers, "no other source of production risk is as nationally significant as drought in terms of lost agricultural production and income. A major drought can reduce crop yields, lead farmers to cut back planted or harvested acreage, reduce livestock productivity, and increase costs of production inputs such as animal feed or irrigation water." This information is archived in the USDA's National Agricultural Library.
However, there is help available for producers. Any ranchers who have incurred additional operating costs for transporting water to livestock due to an eligible drought should look into assistance, which may be available through the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program (ELAP). Also available through ELAP, an online tool can help ranchers document and estimate payments to cover feed transportation costs caused by drought.
Other drought resources for Montana ranchers are collected on the DROUGHT HUB, which is maintained by the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSGA). With this communication hub, the MSGA reveals its commitment to keeping its members up-to-date on drought related information and resources.
According to Dallas Mount, an instructor with the Ranching for Profit School and the CEO of Ranch Management Consultants, anyone in the ranching business is familiar with drought as a normal part of life. He refers to droughts as capable of presenting opportunities for those ready to seize them.
In his column "ProfitTips," Mount quotes Bud Williams when he explains that ranchers have three things in their inventory: grass, money, and livestock. "Each decision we make emphasizes one or more of these over the other. In early signs of drought, it is often smart to trade livestock for money and preserve grass."
To illustrate, Mount examines the potential impact of delaying destocking decisions. In a sample scenario, Mount assumes conditions in which an average pasture has the carrying capacity of 300 cows for ten months, or 3,000 cow-calf pair months of grazing. During a drought year like 2022, management can expect a 40% reduction in forage production. That implies that a producer will only have capacity of 1,800 cow-calf pair months, or 180 pairs for ten months. Any stockgrower who continues to graze 300 pairs will run out of forage in six months, leaving a deficit of four months of additional feed. In much of Cattle County, last year's hay was $300/ton. Anyone choosing to feed hay for those four months would incur an additional $600/hay per cow or $180,000 for the 300 cows-assuming that it would take two tons of hay per cow. This scenario suggests that delaying destocking can be extremely costly.
Farmers are having to make difficult decisions, as well. Add to the drought the current high fuel prices and challenges getting fertilizer due to the war on Ukraine, and farmers are suffering. In response, some farmers are making different crop choices, investing in soil health, and enrolling in crop insurance and other farm risk management programs. Because farmers face differing levels of drought vulnerability, they have a variety of strategies to deploy so as to boost drought resilience.
The USDA Economic Research Service reports that "farmers can make small but meaningful improvements in their drought resilience through investments and actions that enhance soil moisture-holding capacity. A variety of management practices that increase soil organic matter while reducing soil-moisture loss-such as no-till or reduced tillage, use of cover crops, and conservation crop rotations-may help farms adapt to drought risk. . . . Every 1% increase in soil organic matter retains an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre."
The recent rainfall is also leading some to be mildly optimistic, with one producer saying: "We could still get some additional rain this spring. Farmers are eternal optimists; we don't pay a thousand dollars a ton for fertilizer and put it out there and be a pessimist."
