He says most ranch sales he witnesses these days are recreation ranches, especially those owned by wealthy families, rather than working cattle ranches. “A lot of these guys are third- or fourth-generation ranchers,” Grieve says. “They’ve learned what it takes to withstand these blips and droughts. So they’re mostly reducing herds rather than selling the ranch.”
Still, U.S. cattle inventories last year sunk to the lowest since 1952, as ranch managers culled herds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual inventory.
Diversifying operations
This year's drought is more extensive than any since the 1950s, afflicting roughly 80 percent of agricultural land in the United States, and the USDA has designated 2,186 counties in 41 states as disaster areas due to drought. Losses, generally measured in crop insurance claims, won't be known for several more months, the agency said.
Some ranchers, including Currier in western Colorado, are diversifying by offering hunting and fishing tours, or opening a dude ranch or event center for weddings. The latter may appeal especially to ranch managers whose grassy pastureland is becoming drier and overrun by woody plants, a process triggered by climate change. Other cattlemen, aiming to trim input costs, put their cattle on a diet – feeding them less protein-intensive alfalfa grass, for instance, and more straw, corn stalks and protein supplements. But, as Currier, notes, it's not as nutritious. "It's like force-feeding cows something they don't really like to eat."
The flower problem
Then there’s the flower problem: New cattle from outside the region can take a long time to adjust to local forage. For instance, cattle moved from east Texas to Las Cruces, N.M. took more than a year to start munching on four-winged saltbush and other local shrubs that dominate the local menu, according to Derek Bailey, an animal and rangeland specialist at New Mexico State University.
Longer-term adaptation strategies focus on genetics. Advancements in genomics are converging with environmental changes to spur researchers to breed animals with features especially suitable to hotter and drier climates. One example is matching the floppy-eared Brahman from India with black Angus that most commonly roams U.S. rangelands. Brahman meat is not as tasty as Angus, but blend their genes and you create "the best of both worlds in drought conditions," says Bailey.
Grain and other crop producers are in a bind, resorting to a mix of time-tested and cutting-edge farming techniques to grow more with less water. Although dryland producers – those who grow crops without irrigation – are more vulnerable in times of drought, many irrigators are gazing warily at dropping water tables.
Testing new practices
Curtis Sayles is a dryland farmer in the tiny town of Siebert on Colorado's eastern plain. He hasn't plowed his 5,000 acres of winter wheat, corn, sunflower and millet in years – a practice that builds soil moisture and cuts wind erosion. A downside is that most practitioners apply more herbicides to keep the weeds out. Sayles is experimenting with cover crops, including radishes, soybeans and chickpeas, in between or simultaneous with cash crops. He hopes this method, which has proved successful in wetter regions, will free him from using chemicals.
For entrepreneurial farmers like Sayles, the key to surviving intense droughts and other vagaries of a changing climate lies in testing new practices and abandoning old ones. While large cattle operators are trimming their herds, Sayles and his wife are buying more steer, filling a niche for high-end local beef.
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9 Comments
Add CommentThe premise of the article by Susan Moran seems to be completely untruthful. If you look at the data attached you will notice a VERY slight reduction in the annual average rainfall and you will notice that there have always been wide variations in the annual rainfall.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.google.com/imgres?q=colorado+rainfall+trend&hl=en&safe=images&sa=X&tbo=d&biw=832&bih=469&tbm=isch&tbnid=NZOWuDVYhscRtM:&imgrefurl=http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/on-droughts-and-fires-past&docid=CKSc7gs2DqOQ3M&imgurl=http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/images-2/multigraphcolo.png/image_preview&w=400&h=338&ei=utijUN_7Oefq2QWxv4FY&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=187&vpy=134&dur=2028&hovh=206&hovw=244&tx=111&ty=83&sig=114091406124388918232&page=2&tbnh=141&tbnw=167&start=10&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:10,i:131
Unfortunately too many people in the US don't believe in global warming and too many that do believe that it will be sudden. I find it fascinating that the UK, which is if I remember correctly, is far more urbanised has more people observing the subtle changes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi Am thinking about this post.is it true or false?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSisko, I think you misunderstood the point. Re-read this sentence from the article:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"What climate scientists really tell us is not so much that it'll be drier and hotter…as it'll be dramatically more variable."
The data you provide about annual precipitation does not provide the entire story. Variations in rainfall also happen within a growing season. If it's dry most of the growing season, then there is a large storm that seems to "make up" for the dry spell (as in annual rainfall), that's wasted water. It typically just runs off. That was the case this year in the midwest. What is needed is smaller regular rains, not dry spells followed by a deluge.
Sisko,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf only Colorado was involved in the drought....you might have a point about something. 80% of the country was effected?
Crop conditions were quite bad this past summer, though climate change deniers were in full-on denial mode.
Take the corn crop for example. The last USDA crop I collected (week ending Aug 26, 2012) reported the following crop conditions (%) for 18 states (92% of the corn came from these states in 2011):
very poor poor fair good excellent
2012 26 26 26 19 3
2011* 7 12 27 42 12
* the 2011 numbers for at the same point in the year as the 2012 numbers.
See any difference. Most climate change deniers can't see the difference.
Yes, there is variability in temperature, humidity and precipitation year-to-year. As this article states, expect even more variability in the future. Did you not read the article?
"But scientists agree that climate change will up the ante considerably by bringing more extreme weather gyrations – searing drought one year, followed by torrential storms that can wash away cracked soil and destroy crops rather than quench their thirst."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis comment seemed to fly-in-the-face of a decade-long 2001-2011 period of cooling. Granted, 2012 was vastly hotter, on average, the Met had to admit that the trendline from 1997-2012, showed that Global Warming stopped 16 years ago’ aka ‘the pause’,
http://bit.ly/109dyJx
Where will the first food riots in 2013 happen? I am thinking Egypt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA) Extremes of rainfall have not a great deal to do with cooling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisB) What cooling? Please give us something better than a the BS of a x-weatherman without a college degree, who finally did manage to publish some work, only that work refuted his own position on the UHI effect. Seriously, what cooling?
<This comment seemed to fly-in-the-face of a decade-long 2001-2011 period of cooling.>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour comment flies in the face of ALL and ANY evidence as those ten years contained the nine hottest years since the mid 1800s when modern climate records +/- began.
It is rare to read anything that is in the face of all validated research and a general acceptance of the facts as clearly wrong as this, presented with the selfconfidence generally only known from comments showing an exceptionally obvious ignorance of the subject. Or from professional shills.
At worst you should have first searched for "climate change hottest years", it would have saved you the beans. As is you spilled them unretrievably.