FULTON, Ill. — A drought calculator has been designed by rangeland specialists to provide livestock producers a tool to help them make decisions for their operation during dry conditions.
“This calculator has been developed from a need to help you make a better decision on the impact of drought conditions on the number of livestock that can be on the land,” said Arnold Norman, rangeland management specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.
Norman discussed the drought calculator during the Illinois Forage Institute, organized by the Illinois Forage and Grassland Council.
“You are depending on precipitation and temperatures to grow forage,” he said. “When we run into situations where we’re not getting enough precipitation or enough warm temperatures to drive those plants to start growing, we start stressing the amount of forage available to the animals.”
During the season, the specialist said, producers should watch for alerts that indicate dry weather is impacting the pasture conditions.
“You can use pasture sticks to measure the height of the grass,” he said. “Or you might notice the body condition score of the cattle is starting to slide. Most of the year cattle should maintain a body condition score of 5 to 6.”
When forage begins to run low producers are faced with decisions such as buying hay or reducing the size of the herd.
“Selling animals is usually your last choice because you have worked hard to get the genetics where you want,” the rangeland specialist said.
“If you decide to sell animals you need to figure out how many to sell,” he continued. “And you may decide to put them in a pen and feed the cattle until you’re comfortable with selling them.”
Producers can use the drought calculator to determine the minimum feed cost for animals and project how much it will cost to feed the animals for a certain number of days.
“With the calculator, you can connect to the futures market, get a projected price and then it will determine how much it will cost to feed the animals,” Norman explained.
“Most of the time, the number for today is a better deal than the one you’ll get 150 days down the road,” he said. “The calculator is designed to help you make a decision that doesn’t cost so much money.”
To gather data for the calculator, the NRCS specialists utilized information from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
“You can go back nearly 100 years on the NOAA site for precipitation records,” Norman said. “We figure the average precipitation for a particular area, match it against the current precipitation and figure out the deviation.”
Of all the things that affect forage production each year, the rangeland specialist said, “the biggest factor is this year’s precipitation and the next most important factor is what happened last year.”
To develop the calculator, Norman said, the year is divided into “trigger” months.
“We found that if you don’t get a certain amount of precipitation in certain months, then you will not get average forage production,” he explained.
Many cattlemen are unaware of the cost of overgrazing pastures, he said.
“If you don’t take care of the forages, it will cost you the next year,” he stressed. “Because the first thing that happens the following year is the plants will rebuild the root systems first and you get little growth above the ground.”
Drought conditions will affect cool season grasses and annuals more than warm season grasses, Norman said.
“If you only have enough forage for 90 percent of your animals, this is the thing most people forget about,” he explained. “The whole herd will suffer because the body condition scores go down.”
Norman said the calculator is available on the North Dakota, Utah and New Mexico NRCS Web sites, and he expects it will also be placed on the Nebraska and Minnesota NRCS websites.
“It should be available on the Illinois NRCS Web site within the year, and we also plan to put in on a CD,” he said. “It will probably also be posted on the (National Cattlemen’s Beef Association) Web site, and we would like to attach it to the drought monitor webpage.”
For more information, visit www.nrcs.usda.gov.