Agricultural News
Beef Production at a Turning Point? Maybe, Maybe Not. Either Way it's a Good Idea to Plan for Extreme Weather
Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:23:38 CDT
There is a new blog post out on the Southern Plains Perspective by Clay Pope talking about producers taking action to plan for weather extremes. Read below!
It’s amazing what you can find when you’re searching the internet for blog ideas. Just today, I typed in drought, cattle and climate change and headlines “Cattle Industry’s complex pressures and prospects,” and “the cattle industry may be at a turning point” popped up on my screen, leading to a trove of articles dedicated to the challenges facing ranchers and feedlot operators throughout the United States. And with all this dry weather, it’s not hard to imagine why.
I’m not going to run through the whole litany of woes that this drought has brought to the American beef industry. We all know the tale. We have seen the long lines of trailers at sale barns and stockyards. We remember the horrible impact that sudden weather changes and extreme heat stress had on feedlots in Western Kansas earlier this summer. Many of us have first-hand knowledge about how a shortage of hay is impacting livestock operations throughout the region.
It hasn’t been a fun year (or years depending on where you are at). And it may well be having a long-term impact on cattle production in the region.
Case in point, a Texas A&M report earlier this summer pointed out that with the cattle sell off we were seeing, replacement heifers nation-wide are at their lowest numbers since USDA started keeping count in 1973. This means that even if it starts raining everywhere tomorrow and pastures miraculously recovered overnight, it will take a long time for the cattle herd numbers to recover, if they ever do. This differs from the sell-off that accompanied the drought of 2011-2015 in that while there was a huge selloff of cattle at that time, more replacement heifers were maintained in the hope of rebuilding herds when conditions improved.
This time more heifers are going to the sale barn.
And while over-all cattle numbers in the U.S. have been falling for some time due to increased efficiency, one can argue that the Texas cattle herd never quite returned to its pre-drought of 2011 size. Toss in the fact that Nebraska passed Texas as the nation’s number one cattle feeding state in 2015 (although Texas later re-gained its crown) and you start to wonder if we are indeed seeing a long-term change in the U.S. cattle industry.
This may or may not be the case. When you say something about the withering of the Southern Plains cattle industry, you would do well to remember the quote attributed to Mark Twain when he read about his own demise- “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I, in no way, think we will see cattle production in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas go the way of the dodo any time soon. That said, it would behoove us to consider the challenges that extreme weather continues to cause agriculture throughout the region.
As this blog has said so many times before, we need to do all we can to prepare for events like droughts, floods and blizzards. We know the weather around here can turn on a dime. While we hope for the best, we need to plan for the worst. Drought plans, efforts to reduce heat stress, strategies to help animals deal with extreme cold snaps, improved grazing, soil health practices to hold on to moisture and control run-off and erosion, prescribed fire and wildfire fuel management–these are all among the things that agriculture producers should consider when looking to “harden” their farms and ranches to the crazy shenanigans that Mother Nature likes to throw at us.
Producers need to take a little time and put some thought in to how they can best prepare for weather extremes. A good place to start would be to visit your local USDA Service Center or their partners with cooperative extension to see what suggestions and strategies they might have and what assistance or programs you might qualify for.
The are some subtle (and some not so subtle) changes going on. We can’t control the weather, but we can take action to get ready for it. Change is inevitable and the future can be hard to predict. We can, however, take steps to get ready for whatever comes our way.
To view this blog post on the Southern Plains Perspective website, click here.
To access more blog posts and podcast episodes on the Southern Plains Perspective, click here.
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