MANAGEMENT OF RANGELAND

What Are Droughts And Can Ranchers Survive Them?

Drought Management. It sounds like a great idea, but the term might be an oxymoron since droughts have a tendency to manage us. Nevertheless, there still needs to be a "survival" strategy which recognizes the importance of planning. These plans should be flexible enough to deal with individual circumstances of each drought as it comes. Obviously some droughts are worse than others.

Droughts are normal parts of all environments, and as such, they have plagued all agriculturalists. At any one time there are likely several severe droughts ongoing anywhere in the world, usually in places like Africa, Australia or North America. Right now, anyone in the Trans-Pecos, no matter how far removed from his agrarian roots he might be, surely recognizes that we're in one. Depending on your business, though, you'll probably define a drought in different ways. If you are a rancher, you'll probably be in tune to forage growing conditions, and not just mere precipitation totals. Nevertheless, precipitation is usually the most commonly used means of defining drought.

"True drought" has been defined as 75% or less of the average yearly rainfall. Moving from East to Far West Texas, this occurs from 16% to 45% of the time. In most of Texas, droughts so classified last only for one year; except in the Trans-Pecos, where chances are higher for consecutive drought years. Even if you do not use the 75% criterion, in the Trans-Pecos three of every five years falls somewhere below average rainfall. Hence the words of John Merrill, a veteran Texas rancher and educator, might be appropriate: "It is our plight to be successful under conditions as we find them."

Surviving drought necessitates planning for drought. This should include grazing management, stock reduction and financial plans for survival, as well as a vegetation response plan for recovery once the drought ends. For example, warm season grasses have been extremely stressed by successive years of low moisture. Recent rains will provide green-up, but this needs to be properly managed in order to allow tender new leaves a chance to mature and do their job. That job is to use sunlight to replenish nutrient reservoirs in the roots. Individual droughts are unpredictable as to their severity and duration, so there is probably no such thing as a perfect plan. However, any plan can help with "damage control."

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines recover as "to bring back to normal position or condition." Drought recovery implies a return to a previous condition. Unfortunately droughts are often considered as only temporary events and that conditions will return to "normal" once the drought has broken. Some ecologists suggest that this may not be true in arid and semi-arid rangelands. They suggest that these ecosystems may not automatically return to the same pre-disturbance "steady state" (Might some cases of brush encroachment within the last 100 years be examples of this?). Nevertheless, when rains do eventually come, sound grazing management practices will help make the most of it.