Drought Planning, part 2: Short Term Strategies

This is part 2 of a multi-part series. Read part 1 here >>

Short term strategies

The short term drought planning strategies are the actions you can take when you decide to activate your drought plan. 

• Reduce stock density
  • This is where the “adaptive” in AMP grazing comes into play. When you have less forage available, you need a larger area for your animals to graze for them to get their required daily ration. So you will end up with fewer pounds of animal grazing per acre compared to your spring grazing. But the quandary here is that if you make your paddocks larger, you will have fewer paddocks and you risk returning to the same paddock before it has a chance to recover. 
  • This is where that relationship with your neighbors can pay dividends.
  • Read on for some more tips on how to address this.
• Reduce the size of your herd
  • This is a good time to put a critical eye on your herd. Do you have any cows or ewes that didn’t produce a calf or lamb this year? That is an easy criteria to help you make the decision to cull. Can you move up processing dates if you have animals that are close to being finished? Or maybe you just turn those culls into burger. But depending on the market, you might do ok selling them as live animals, either through your own outlets, or at the sale barn. 
• Leave enough residual to allow for regrowth – Don’t overgraze
  • It is tempting to let your animals graze whatever you have available. But when they eat the grass down to the ground, you set into motion some compounding effects. 
    • You’ve taken away all of the photosynthetic capacity of the grass to regrow when the rains do return, so your recovery is going to be delayed and could even eliminate your fall grazing season. 
    • The soil surface now has no shade and when exposed to direct summer sunlight, it can get hot enough to kill off some of the soil biology; bare soil surfaces can be 50 degrees hotter than air temperature. That impact on soil biology will further delay regrowth. 
    • Finally, without armor on the soil, if you do get a heavy summer thunderstorm, or when the first rains of fall return, that bare soil is more prone to erosion and that baked surface will not allow much water to infiltrate. So that rain you desperately need will either run off or evaporate. 
• Pull animals off your pasture and feed hay
  • If you are running low on forage and don’t have extra land to graze (either your own or a neighbor’s), and you’ve already taken steps to address your herd size, this is probably your best option. If you find that you are having to do this every year, your land is likely overstocked and giving another look at your herd size is probably a good idea. Ideally, you will only have to resort to this costly step in the driest of years. 
• Allow enough time for recovery
  • “Recovery time, recovery time, recovery time.” This should be your mantra when making any grazing decisions. Letting your pasture rest until it is ready to be re-grazed – not based on a calendar, but based on the quality and quantity of the forage – will improve your pasture year over year and over time, you will see noticeable improvements in your ability to get through periods of drought. 

There were a lot of tips presented here, and we don’t expect anyone to have a perfect drought plan right away, or even ever. The key takeaway, though, is to make a plan before you need it, implement it when necessary, and continuously evaluate your progress; making adjustments as needed. Then evaluate again when the drought is over to determine how well your short term strategies worked and if you need to implement or revise the long term strategies. Those long term ideas could eventually put you in a position to have such amazing drought resilience that you could be a buyer of animals when everyone else is selling and be able to score some great deals. 

Also know that you will make mistakes along the way, but when you do your evaluation, reframe those mistakes as learning opportunities. After all, if everything always went perfectly, you’d never learn anything new. 

Lessons Learned

Let’s go back to Mike’s farm, and look at how things turned out in this extra-dry year, and what can be learned in planning for future dry years. 

With October to March rainfall only slightly below normal, the pastures had ample moisture, and coupled with good growing conditions in April, the forage looked amazing in the spring. There was so much available, that extra yearling cows were brought over from another property where the grass there could use a bit of extra rest. That bountiful forage gave a sense of confidence that those extra animals could graze there all summer. However, not enough attention was paid to the fact that starting April, each month through July was well below the average rainfall amount. In July the forage regrowth stopped completely and it was clear the stocking density needed to be drastically reduced. 

All of the animals were moved to a sacrifice area and fed hay for a couple of weeks with the hopes that there would be some rain and regrowth, and that rain came tantalizingly close, but not close enough. By the time the extra cows were moved to another site with more grass, the damage had already been done and the impacts would last the rest of the year. A couple of rain events in August helped things start to green up again, but because everything had been slightly overgrazed, it’s possible that there may not be enough recovery for any meaningful fall grazing season. 

What was learned from this experience? 

1. Spring forage is always going to look good, don’t let that fool you.
2. Pay more attention to rainfall patterns. When both April and May both had half the normal precipitation, that should have been a trigger to initiate a drought plan. If June came in extra wet, then plans could have returned to something more normal. But this year, June rain was also half of normal, so activating that drought plan and destocking earlier would have been the correct move this year. 
3. Set a rain threshold where the drought plan kicks in. That threshold will depend on when your critical rain periods happen. At Mike’s farm, the winter rain (Nov-Feb) has only once fallen below 75% of normal, and that was just barely. So that 75% could be a winter threshold, but in general, rain during those months is sufficient enough to keep the ground at near saturation. It’s really the March to June rains that determine the ability to get through the summer dry season. The new strategy could be that if one month falls below 50% of normal rainfall, to move into a monitoring phase, but if two consecutive months hit that target (or maybe ⅔ of normal rain over those two months), that would trigger activation of the drought plan.