Drought conditions around the country can be a mixed bag any given year. This year, portions of the Central Plains, West, Southwest and Midwest have dealt with various drought conditions.
At some point, drought will inevitably impact your farm or ranch. When dry times do occur, you’ll be faced with a number of difficult decisions to maintain both your herd and resources. These five tips can help you resourcefully manage through a drought while keeping performance at the forefront.
1. Watch out for water
During drought, the first thing you want to monitor is water availability. Many farms and ranches rely on surface water sources such as ponds and streams to keep cattle hydrated. If cattle are deprived of water, they will have lower intakes of both forage and mineral, negatively impacting performance.
When surface water is available during drought, especially in a hot environment, there can be changes in water quality. When you have evaporation from standing water, any less-than-desirable components in that water will concentrate. Imbalances in minerals can lead to antagonistic reactions. For example, high sulfate or iron content in water can result in reduced availability of copper. Feeding a quality mineral with organic trace minerals can help avoid those antagonisms and improve bioavailability.
Blue-green algae blooms are another concern when water gets in short supply or becomes stagnant. Cattle may be unwilling to drink water if it has blue-green algae, and if they do, there are potential health risks if the blooms consolidate due to the cyanotoxins they contain. In severe cases, cattle can die from the toxicity, so it is best to find alternate water sources if you have blue-green algae present.
2. ‘Right-size’ the herd
Culling cows is a resort you often want to avoid. However, proactively “right-sizing” your herd with strategic culling can help you be better prepared regarding forage resources in times of drought.
Open, late-bred, lame, broken-mouthed and poor-body-condition cows are often the top candidates to cull in normal conditions, but particularly during a drought. Should you need to cull deeper, take a hard look at your current stocking rate and average cow size.
There is a tendency to overstock and push pastures when things are good. Many producers are running more cows – and bigger cows – than their pastures can sustain. Consider using conservative stocking rates based on weight instead of overall head count. Your cows are likely larger than previous generations and require more resources to maintain themselves. If you have access to scales, weigh your herd at different times of the year to determine which cows are larger than what you’d like and cull those big females to help moderate your cow size. Don’t forget to project mature cow size when selecting replacement heifers; matching the cow herd to your environment is an ongoing process.
Also, contemplate the types of cattle you are grazing. Maybe you’re running a 75% to 25% split of cows and stockers. In times of drought, you have the option to sell those stockers a little bit more quickly and conserve some grazing for the cows.
3. Remove pressure
Early weaning has several advantages during drought, primarily reducing lactation pressure in cows. Taking calves off cows a few weeks or months earlier than normal can reduce the nutritional demands of the cow herd, allowing them to regain body condition and focus their nutrients toward the calf growing in utero. Data from the University of Nebraska shows that every two-and-a-half days without a calf, you’ll extend the grazing period for the cow by one day.
For the calf, getting started on feed sooner has the benefit of increasing quality grade. When early weaning, it’s expected for producers to forgo some potential weight gain, and greater attention should be given to managing stress for these young calves.
If you are going to early wean, it is advantageous to provide creep feed to calves while on pasture so they can grow accustomed to eating feed. Even if you’re not going to wean early, creep feeding definitely has some benefits during drought. Creep feeding can help calves reach their genetic potential for gain by filling the gap in nutrition often found when milk and forages alone are insufficient to provide the optimal diet. Furthermore, research indicates that the introduction of starch early in life sets the stage for improved quality grades upon harvest.
4. Feed the next generation
Nutrition is crucial not only for your cows and calves on the ground but for the next generation. Fetal programming happens while the fetus grows in utero. Depriving nutrition from a cow with a developing fetus can compromise that future calf’s lifetime performance and actually compromise the performance of subsequent generations as well.
If you retain replacement heifers from cows that have experienced drought, they were likely stressed during critical times of fetal programming. Manage your expectations for those heifers’ lifetime reproductive performance. Alternatively, it could be advantageous to purchase replacement females that were born and developed in more favorable environmental conditions.
In drought years, you tend to see calves underperform in terms of weaning weights, and that can often be traced back to what happened during early development. Those calves might be challenged from a health standpoint. Providing quality nutrition to your cows so they can meet their own needs paired with the requirements of their in-utero calf is paramount to future herd performance.
5. Consider supplementation versus substitution
Nutrition during a drought can fall into two categories: supplementation and substitution.
At the point when your pastures have reduced forage growth, you’ll want to supplement cattle with additional feedstuffs. Supplementation is defined by the delivery of less than or equal to around 0.5% of a cow’s bodyweight in supplemental feedstuffs. Tubs, blocks and liquid feeds are all great options to support cows while they are still out on drought-stressed pasture.
Strategically place supplements in underutilized areas of the pasture to help better distribute grazing. Providing a quality mineral program with the supplemental feed will also help ensure you’re fully utilizing available forages by keeping the rumen microbes working, along with supporting the reproduction, health and overall performance of your herd.
When forage is in short supply and the quality has dropped, it is time to implement substitution. Substitution is when you provide a higher level of a particular supplement to replace the nutrition cattle received from forage. Bulk self-feeders and range cubes are options to help spare forage and meet the requirements of your herd. If things get too dire, cows could be moved into a drylot and fed a total mixed ration (TMR) to get by.
Work with a nutritionist to create a nutrition program that best suits your situation so you can efficiently make it through a drought while maintaining performance.
