Drought Fallout

The drought has been catching up to folks and causing some hard times. My husband stopped to pick up a bag of goat feed on his way home from work tonight. (We supplement their foraging.) The cost had gone up $3 just from a month ago. It was several dollars higher than usual last time too. So feed costs are already starting to soar.

I read in a circular the other night that the local extension offices are warning farmers that the corn has to be tested for nitrate content before it can be baled and fed to cows. As it turns out, drought stressed corn is unusually high in nitrates. Too much nitrate content in a cow's feed can kill it. So some farmers can't even bale their dead corn for forage.

Just now my husband received a voice mail from our neighbor who raises beef cattle. He usually sells some in the fall, but has determined that he won't be able to afford hay for  his cows this winter. He's going to have to sell his entire herd this fall. 

His cows have over-grazed his land before selling time though. (He has 150 acres or something.) So in the meantime he wants to rent our hay fields and the adjoining woods for pasturage. This is despite the fact that the hay isn't worth cutting. It's dry and dormant and straw-like. He also knows we're missing a small section of fence and several gates. And he knows there are some weak spots in the old post and beam fencing too. But he still offered to pay us to lease the land, and to repair the fencing.

We know nothing about raising cattle and did a quickie search. We were shocked to learn just how much grass pasture a cow needs. You can only keep 2 cows on 5 acres. And they have to be removed from that 5 acres in the spring or they tear the new-growing grass from the ground by the roots and decimate the pasture. 

We also know from educating ourselves about dam maintenance last fall, that the previous cattle rancher damaged our dam by letting his cows climb up and down it. It eroded the front face of the dam. So we know that with the plants all dormant or dead this summer, we can't let the neighbor's cows traverse the front side of the dam or we risk major erosion problems and the dam's integrity. It's a large dam and would take a lot of fencing to cordon off.

My husband's over talking to our unfortunate neighbor right now in order to get details like: how many head of cattle he wants to run on our land, what he means date-wise by "sell them this fall," how much he is willing to pay to lease the land, if we'll need to cover his animals on our insurance policy, etc. etc. We'll have a tough decision to make soon. We'd hate to destroy the roots of our overstressed hay and have to reseed in the spring. We don't want to compromise the dam. We don't really have hay to give him, as we've promised it to another neighbor who is a horse owner. There's more fence repair necessary than he probably imagines. He probably won't just take cash for feed costs (and he must need an astronomical sum anyhow, considering that fence repair land leasing is cheaper than buying feed.) But we really want to help a neighbor in need. And so on and so forth. And thus begins the drought fallout.