Drought on Grazing Livestock

Knowledge Nuggets

• In advance, plan steps to provide feed and maintain productivity of your herd to reduce the effects of a possible drought.

• Incorporate all your grazing animals into one herd instead of keeping them in several small ones. By having more animals in a paddock for a shorter time, the entire area gets grazed uniformly and more use is made of the less desirable plants.

• Place your animals in a rotational grazing program rather than allowing them to continuously graze. Rest and recovery after grazing is critical to maintaining healthy plants.

• Determine classes of livestock within your herd to liquidate if necessary.

• Market your yearlings first, as yearlings typically get sold into the feedlot market which is not influenced by drought as much. Secondly, wean your calves early and feed them until the appropriate marketing time. This ensures calf growth and lessens feed requirement to the cows.

• Pregnancy test as early as possible and sell open cows.

• Supplement the grazing animals as necessary. Supplements can often be used to correct low forage quality. However, feed supplements are usually not an economical substitute for range forage.

• Try not to feed weed infested hay. The future cost of weedy hay is very expensive. If weedy hay must be fed, feed in an area that is removed from riparian areas and wooded areas. Be sure to keep your stock confined for several days after feeding the bad hay to prevent them from spreading viable seed through their manure.

• Incorporate annual forages into your grazing plan. By removing animals off of your perennial land, you effectively increase the recovery time of the perennial plants.

• Strip graze your seeded land to minimize waste. By regulating the quantity of feed the animals receive each day, you will lengthen the availability of the feed resource.

• If possible, rent additional land. Often moving the stock to the feed is cheaper than purchasing the feed and bringing it home.

• Do not restock until you are certain that your pasture and range land has recovered.