The beginning of the rainy season seems like an odd time to talk about planning for drought, right? But in reality, it’s the perfect time to plan, since the dry season is fresh in your mind and the time to plan for any disaster is well before it happens.
So if your fields were looking especially parched this year, you are not alone. But what should you be thinking about in order to plan for the inevitable next time we have a dry, scorching summer? Here are some tips and strategies, some short term that can be in your plan to implement when needed, and some longer term tactics that will improve your overall drought resilience.
Long term strategies
Let’s start with the long term strategies, because they will not only help you out during the dry season, but they will also provide many other economic and environmental benefits.
Implement Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing. This is a grazing system that mimics the actions of large wild animal herds, like bison. In AMP grazing, you are using electric fences to graze animals in a high density, but short duration – often 1 day per paddock – rotations. You adapt the size of your paddocks based on the density and condition of the forage. When done well, this system keeps grass in a green, vegetative phase much longer than a continuously grazed field, or even a rotational grazed system with fixed paddock sizes.
Silvopasture is the concept of intentionally adding trees to a pasture. There are multiple benefits to doing this, but it may not be appropriate for every situation.
Pros
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- Increased shade reduces evaporative losses from the soil, and grasses will stay green much longer than non-shaded areas.
- The increased shade will improve animal comfort and welfare
- Many types of trees have foliage that can be used as supplemental forage when pasture conditions are poor.
- The increased biodiversity will also benefit pollinators and below-ground microbes
- Additional carbon storage to help combat climate change
Cons
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- New plantings need to be protected from grazers until they are well established. This can lead to additional complexity in your fence installation.
- Similarly, if you cut your field for hay, you want that field as open as possible.
- There is a cost associated with establishing trees: buying the seedlings, tree protection tubes are highly recommended, and you may need to irrigate them for 1-2 years to get them established. There are funding opportunities to offset these costs, though.
Increasing your soil carbon levels will increase your water holding capacity of the soil. Every 1% increase in soil carbon will hold an additional 27,000 gallons of water per acre. AMP grazing is a great tool for increasing carbon, but incorporating applications of compost and biochar can help speed up that process.
Long term monitoring of both climatic conditions and your forage can help you in your planning.
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- Every farmer should be measuring daily precipitation at their location. In addition to that statewide variation, there can be significant differences in rainfall between your farm and the nearest official station. Having that hyperlocal data will help you determine when it is time to implement your drought plan. A fun way to measure your rainfall while contributing to a broader dataset is through cocorahs.org. This is a citizen science program where people across the US and Canada all have the same simple rain gauge, and enter their readings to the web site every day. This is how Mike knows how dry the summer of 2025 was, he has daily data back to 2008!
- Documenting your forage with photos, on a grazing chart, or even through measurements like dry matter analysis will help you see your progress, and give you year to year comparisons to help you make decisions about your drought plan.
Cultivate relationships with your neighbors. This might seem odd at first to include here, but if you have folks in your community who have underutilized land, get to know them and pitch the idea of grazing your animals on their land. You might save them the cost and time of mowing it, all while improving their land with your AMP grazing. Pitch it to them as a win-win situation for both of you, and you might even get access to it for free! Even in a non-drought year, longer rest periods between grazing are often required during the summer months, so having access to additional grazing land can help you achieve that.
Establish a diverse mix of forages. This one falls a bit between the short and long term strategies, because it can involve some actions that need to be taken every year, but if you wait until the first signs of drought, it is too late. Adding deep-rooted legumes, like red clover, will not only help bring nitrogen from the air into your soil, they are highly palatable and desired by livestock, and the deep roots can access moisture when shallower rooted plants might go dormant. There is also a plethora of warm season grasses and forbs that can be incorporated into your pastures that might continue to perform during our dry summers. While they may live as perennial plants in some parts of the country, they often live as annuals here, so they do need to be planted from seed each year. Dr Shayan Ghajar of OSU is performing many multi-year trials of a variety of species, and regularly provides updates at the annual Small Farms Conference.
This is the first post in a multi-post series.