Northern California, where I live, experienced a rare phenomenon the weekend before last. Moisture actually fell from the sky. I can’t call it “rain” because my town got just one-quarter of an inch after several hours of heavy drizzling. Now, we Californians are being told it likely will not rain again until September or October.
This makes for so many years of drought in the state that I have lost count. But I can remember only about 10 years of normal rainfall since I came here in 1986. I thus marvel at the ability of California’s beef cattle ranchers to manage their herds and precious pasture and water resources in a way that keeps their herds together. It is a minor miracle that the state added 20,000 beef cows to the herd in 2021—not the other way around.
I am praying for rain of course, just like my friend Pete exhorts us to do at the bottom of each of his weekly comments. But both of us know it will be another year of extreme drought all across the West. After the region’s megadrought deepened so much last year, it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, according to a new study.
A dramatic drying in 2021, about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region, pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s, and it shows no signs of easing in the near future, says a study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Drought in many parts of the country took a bigger than expected bite out of the U.S. cattle herd in 2021 and will continue to play a key role in the fortunes of the U.S. industry. Herd numbers declined by 1.888 million head in 2021, and analysts fear numbers could decline by even more this year. The extent of the drought in some regions of the country is already staggering.
Drought will be the principal determinant of the general cattle industry scenario in 2022, says Derrell Peel of Oklahoma State University. The current Climate Prediction Center drought outlook suggests that drought may persist in regions of the West and Northern Plains that have been in drought (with some improvement in the Pacific Northwest). It may also persist where drought has recently developed in the Southern Plains and perhaps expand even further into the Central Plains region, Peel says. Drought has impacted some regions since 2020, and widespread drought in 2022 could result in much more pronounced cow herd liquidation and relocation than previously. The scenario will be all about what producers have to do, he says.
There will be little flexibility in regions that were in drought in 2020 and 2021, says Peel. For example, Dec. 1 hay stocks in the four-state region of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota were down 40.2 percent year over year. By April or May, this predominantly spring-born calving region could be faced with significant additional liquidation of cows or cow-calf pairs this year, on top of the 8 percent herd liquidation in this region since 2020. The region represents 15.1 percent of the national beef cow herd, he says.
The four-state region of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah has suffered in drought conditions since 2020 and has seen an 11.6 percent beef cow herd liquidation in the past two years. Persistent drought will result in additional liquidation this year. This region represents 5.3 percent of the total beef cow herd, Peel says.
Drought in Texas, Oklahoma, the Southern Plains and Central Plains regions could impact over 53 percent of the total beef cow herd, or roughly 16 million cows, says Peel. Significant drought in 2022 will have more noticeable impacts on cow markets. It will change the timing of feeder cattle and ultimately feedlot production, and it will have more implications for the industry in subsequent years, he says.
Feedlot placements have been large this year as drought continues to force cattle into feedlots. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map shows that more than 61 percent of the contiguous U.S. is in some classification of drought. This is the largest percentage of land in drought classification since 2012, the year when the continental U.S. saw an all-time record of 65 percent during September. The ongoing drought has increased significantly in recent weeks. In the last two months alone, the percentage of the continental U.S. in drought conditions jumped from 55 percent to more than 61 percent. This was an increase of nearly 170,000 square miles, an area larger than the size of California. Facing such a bleak scenario, I can only repeat Pete’s entreaty: Pray for rain. — Steve Kay
(Steve Kay is editor/publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, an industry newsletter published at P.O. Box 2533, Petaluma, CA, 94953; 707-765-1725. Kay’s Korner appears exclusively inWLJ.)
