Drought has ranchers selling cattle, seeking greener pastures

Issue Date: June 20, 2007

By Ching Lee
Assistant Editor

This April 2007 photo of rangeland in Yolo County shows the slow growth of grasses that should have been much more lush and deep at that time of year.

Scant rainfall this season has left California ranchers with dry pastures and insufficient forage to support their cattle, driving many of them to sell their herds early and lose money in the process.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Services, 82 percent of California's rangeland is in poor or very poor condition, largely due to the lack of rainfall, with some areas of the Central Valley getting as little as 40 percent of normal forage growth this past winter.

What makes this year unique is that the drought is widespread through much of the state's winter range, said Matt Byrne, executive vice president of the California Cattlemen's Association. Not only are conditions dry up and down the valley, but areas along the foothills and coastal regions also are experiencing far-below normal precipitation.

"The winter grassland never came on like we expect here in California," Byrne said. "We now have a minimum amount of forage available."

With no grasses for their cattle to graze, many ranchers are either having to purchase supplemental feed, which can be very expensive, sell their animals early or move them to summer irrigated pastures earlier than normal, which puts additional strain on those pastures, Bryne said.

These decisions could have a long-term effect on the cattle sector as a whole, particularly in certain parts of the state, he added. If ranchers are reducing their herd size because they don't have enough feed to sustain them, then there will be fewer calves to supply the future market.

"I've talked to people who've sold a great number of cattle far beyond their normal amount and who have said that if things continue as they are now, they will be completely out of the industry at least for the time being," Byrne said.

John Harvey, a cattle rancher in Ventura County, said he is already facing such a situation. The lack of forage has forced him to get rid of two-thirds of his herd. He sold his calves about two months earlier than normal, with a weaning weight of 400 pounds instead of the typical 600 pounds like in other years. A lower weaning weight at the time of sale means he won't fetch as high a price per head of cattle. He's also eliminated his older cows because they were too expensive to feed.

"We're trying to get down to our basic nucleus," he said.

According to NASS, Ventura County as of early June received a little more than 6 inches of rain so far this year, compared to more than 15 inches last year.

"In a marginal year, we should have grass up to your knee, and in a good year, up to your thigh, almost up to your hip," Harvey said. "We don't even have it over the edge of your boot."

Bryne said some ranchers are sending their herds out of state to as far away as Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico in hopes of finding additional grasses to hold their animals over another season.

Harvey also is looking for greener pastures to send his cattle and has located a few places in the far-north end of the state that he can lease. But transporting his cattle that far away will be expensive, and he's not sure he can afford to do so.

"If this keeps up, if we don't get some disaster relief, I will probably have to sell all of (the cattle) because it will get to a point where it's not economical to keep feeding them," said Harvey.

Some relief may be on the way. President Bush in May signed a bill that included $3 billion in agricultural disaster assistance to help producers who lost 35 percent or more of their livestock or crops in designated disaster counties for 2005, 2006 and up to Feb. 28 of this year. The disaster package is part of the larger $120 billion war funding bill.

Thirteen California counties have been declared disaster areas by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and are eligible for the aid, as are those counties that are considered contiguous to the 13. Producers can receive assistance for only one of those years. USDA officials expect it will take several months before payment applications will be taken.

Jerry Maltby, a Colusa County cattle rancher who runs a feedlot, said not only are ranchers bringing him their cattle early this year, but they are also sending both their cows and calves to his feedlot rather than trucking them from pasture to pasture, which can be expensive to haul and have a negative affect on the health of the animals to where they won't eat and lose weight.

"On the humane side, you don't want them suffering from lack of nutrition, but second of all, you don't want to stress the animal," he said. "Once they get stressed, it's hard to ever get them back. It takes a lot more feed to do that, so a lot of times it's better to just bring them into feedlots. And that's what most of these people did."

For Glenn County cattle rancher Larry Massa, who had to ship his cattle a month early to their summer pastures in Shasta County, the bigger problem now is not having enough drinking water to keep his cattle where they are.

"That's been a real challenge," he said. "I've had to pump water all spring and all winter. Normally we'd have groundwater in ponds or reservoirs. So it changed the way we operated this year."

Another worry is whether the rangelands will have enough feed in the fall when the cattle come back from their summer pastures. By then, all his hay reserves will be gone and there won't be much residual feed left on the rangeland to come back to.

"It just depends on what happens this falls," he said. "If it rains early, this could be a one-year drought. I've experienced all the other droughts, and we always make it through. You may reduce numbers and it hurts financially if you're tied to dry land like we are. But we also have some irrigated ground, which helps us."

Ranchers who raise their cattle on irrigated pastures are getting hit with additional energy costs, said Denis Lewis, a San Joaquin County cattle producer. In more typical years, he wouldn't have to irrigate his ground until late May, but this year, he began irrigating the last weekend in March. His electric bill will be about $2,000 more this year.

Lewis said with so many ranchers culling their herds, they're also flooding the market all at once, driving down cattle prices. He noted that while the price for feeder cattle has been holding steady, prices for calves and bred cows have dropped considerably.

"Nobody really wants to buy them because there's no place for people to take these cattle to," he said.

(Ching Lee is a reporter for Ag Alert. She may be contacted at clee@cfbf.com.)

Permission for use is granted, however, credit must be made to the California Farm Bureau Federation when reprinting this item. Top