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Good
drought management means
balancing range health against cash flow
By
Tony Malmberg
for Headwaters News
Drought started parching our south pastures in ’98,
two years earlier than the rest of the ranch.
We saw increased bare ground, poor plant vigor and one-third less
production. Our sagebrush steppe, Rocky Mountain foothill ranch
outside of Lander, Wyo., receives an average of 13.5 inches of precipitation
per year. Even record-breaking moisture in the critical spring season
of ’99 failed to spark lackluster grasses in this area and
bare ground increased again.
We cut our planned stocking rate for the 2000 grazing season in
response to a previous dry fall. Then the real drought began.
Even with fewer cattle, we were in trouble early. The range's fast-growth
period ended the first week of June — three weeks ahead of
normal. I quickly arranged to ship 1,000 yearlings 30 days early
in response to the shortened growth season. Conditions continued
to worsen.
The hot southwest wind sucked life from our springs,
and cattle struggled to find adequate water all summer long. By
August, I had to split the mud-caked, black-muzzled cattle into
smaller bunches to relieve pressure on limited stock water.
Fires consumed pastures planned for fall grazing, so we shipped
300 head of cow-calf pairs 45 days ahead of schedule. We loaded
tractor-trailers with the calves from the remainder of the cows
30 days early to allow their mother’s time to add much-needed
condition on their bones.
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It's
dry all over the West,
but the suffering isn't equal
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Sept. 18, 2002
Big-picture analyses say the current drought statistically
doesn't
match the Dust Bowl or even the drought and heat of 1988.
Food prices aren't likely to rise anytime soon as a result, homeowners
in Los Angeles and Phoenix have yet to empty their swimming pools,
most restrictions on water use across the West are voluntary and
losses to farmers and ranchers are expected to fall well short of
1988's $56 billion.
And during the height of the Dust Bowl, 63 percent of the nation
was in the most severe stage of drought; in mid-August, that figure
was 37 percent.
Still, the current drought's duration and geographic reach are longer
and bigger than 1988, and the big-picture analyses blur some critical
details in the Mountain West.
The Colorado River last month was running at 14 percent of average,
the lowest in 150 years of record-keeping. Rocky Mountain ranchers
are among the hardest hit, although it's too early to tally losses.
Dry forests have burned in massive fires in Colorado, Arizona, California,
New Mexico and Oregon. And conditions are making more timber vulnerable
to beetles and disease.
And while many urban dwellers are only slightly inconvenienced,
the impact on some small towns, and on forest and field, is dramatic
throughout the region. A summary from recent headlines:
Colorado foresters said they see hundreds
of thousands of pines across the state dying from secondary
results of drought: bark beetles, mistletoe. But what's unusual
is that they also document trees dying from simple lack of water.
Measurements at the Manitou Experimental Forest southwest of Denver
show that the first seven months of 2002 were the driest since records
began in 1937.
Thousands of acres of pines in New
Mexico wilderness areas are succumbing to beetles, as drought-stressed
trees can't produce enough sap to stave off insects.
In
northern Utah, near the Idaho border, a significant number of
farmers raise wheat, barley and hay without irrigation. They've
lost about 70 percent of their yield this year and many say their
operations won't survive another dry year.
In
southern Utah, ranchers that depend on surface water to irrigate
their fields are caught in a bind. Pasture and range is so poor,
cattle are dying but it's too expensive to buy feed. And with everyone
around in the same predicament, ranchers can't auction off their
herds because no one wants to buy them.
Hawkwatch International says its observers have documented a steady
decline since 1997 in the number of hawks, eagles, falcons and
other raptors at its observation points in Nevada, Utah, Montana,
the Grand Canyon and New Mexico. There's no direct cause-and-effect
but plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing at drought, biologists
said.
And while Phoenix residents are basking by the pool, Colorado homeowners
are adjusting
to changed lifestyles. Lafayette has put a moratorium on new
taps and doubled its water rates. In the towns of Silt and Parachute,
lawn-watering violators can get jail time and fines up to $1,000.
Parched Boulder hired six "water cops" to catch criminal
lawn-sprinklers, set up a phone line so residents can turn in their
neighbors, and from June to mid-July, cited 209 violators. The city
stuck rows of plastic pinwheels instead of planting flowers at city
parks and didn't open its public swimming pool.
In Denver, an estimated 75 percent of summer water use goes to landscaping,
two thirds of that for lawns.
Some observers say that federal dams, canals and other water projects
have masked the effect of living, ranching and farming in an arid
climate. But as population growth and development pushes the limits
of the water supply, and the water cycle turns to the dry phase,
Westerners' adjustments may become more permanent.
"It just means we have to adjust our thinking, and come into
better balance with the amount of water our arid landscape can provide,"
says Bart Miller, a lawyer for the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies,
quoted
in the Christian Science Monitor.
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