Usually by early March, the hard red winter wheat on Pat Janssen’s farm is green and high enough to cover his ankles. This year, he had to bend down to see it sprouting, six months after planting.
“This is embarrassing,” Janssen said as he pulled a sprout from the pale, dusty ground for a closer look. The skimpy, poorly developed roots tell the story, he said, of a crop that’s failed so far in just about every way — no good for grazing cattle, and questionable for harvesting grain later in the year.
“You shouldn’t be able to see the ground between the rows. It should look like a really lush lawn just now,” said Janssen, who would typically have around 400 cattle grazing on his fields. As March arrived, he didn’t have any out.
Janssen’s farm in southwest Kansas is one piece of a landscape that’s bone dry to the horizon in four directions, the heart of one of the worst droughts to hit this part of the Plains in decades.
Short on pasture and feed, some farmers have sent a quarter or even a third of their cattle to slaughter, and thousands of acres may not produce a meaningful wheat crop if the region doesn’t receive significant and repeated rainfall, producers said.
Wheat planted here not only feeds cattle but helps make the Great Plains the center of U.S. bread flour production, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Dry spells are nothing new to the region, which typically receives little more than 10 inches of annual rainfall annually. But if extended and severe droughts like the current one that began around 2021 are part of the script for climate change, farmers and agriculture researchers say, the southern Plains are in for periods of scarcity that could reshape what farmers produce, how they produce it and what consumers can expect to pay at the grocery store.
Meat prices are on the climb and will keep rising all around the country for a few years due to this drought, economists said. Flour, bread and other baked goods that rely on the region’s grain crop could become more expensive, too, although economists said those effects are likely to be more muted. Farmers and the agriculture-dependent communities around them hang on, keeping an eye for a change in weather cycles and pinning their hopes on research that could save water and yield more resilient crops and livestock in the long run.
“At this point, I am still optimistic that there are solutions to be had if we are willing to work a little harder and not be afraid to think outside the box,” Janssen said, although he added that his outlook may sour if conditions don’t improve in a year. “If we take the learned from this drought and apply them in normal years, we will ultimately become better stewards of the resources we have been entrusted with.”
Parched crops, hungry cows
With pasture drying up and other feed harder to come by last year, Janssen did what many of his fellow farmers did: sold hundreds of cows for slaughter. He had about a third fewer cows than normal headed into spring, thanks to drought-related herd reductions. He also didn’t bother to harvest 400 acres of water-starved corn, leaving the stunted stalks in the field through the winter to prevent erosion.
Cows are big business in western Kansas and Oklahoma. More than a quarter of the nation’s beef supply comes from within a 90-mile radius of Dodge City, Kan., by some estimates. The city, dubbed “Queen of the Cowtowns,” is home to meatpacking plants owned by National Beef and Cargill Inc., as well as to feed lots with tens of thousands of cattle.
While heavy snow and rain in Western states this winter has provided some relief from a two-decade drought this spring, all of southwest Kansas remains in “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s April 27 monthly report. Precipitation is about half of the average level so far in 2023. Sixty percent of the state is in either exceptional or “extreme” drought.
To the south, in Oklahoma, 20 percent of the state is in “exceptional” drought, and more than a third of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought, although conditions have improved there since the beginning of the year.
Parts of southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma saw their driest March on record, according to the National Weather Service.
Crops grown in those areas are showing the strain. The drought monitor reported that about half of winter wheat, nationally, is in a drought condition. Sorghum — grown largely in Kansas as a livestock feed and source of biofuel — is 80 percent affected by drought. Four out of every 10 beef cows in the nation is affected by drought, according to the monitor..
The outlook for the next few months isn’t encouraging, said Matthew Sittel, assistant state climatologist in Kansas and a professor at Kansas State University. The national Climate Prediction Center anticipates lower-than-average precipitation and higher-than-average temperatures heading into summer.
“Southwest Kansas (and adjacent parts of northwest Oklahoma) are the worst locations in the U.S. right now,” Sittel told E&E News in an email. “I don’t see that changing. It will take repeated rounds of storms and much above normal precipitation to erase the longer-term deficits. It doesn’t appear likely at this point.”
The drought comes on top of longer-range worries about the Ogallala Aquifer, which has supported irrigation in western Kansas for decades and has fallen to as little as 20 percent of capacity in some counties.
The aquifer, in which water lies between particles of sand, silt and gravel, runs through eight states from Texas to South Dakota.
Nearly a quarter of the irrigated High Plains may be unable to support irrigated agriculture by the end of this century if the rate of water removal remains about the same, researchers at Stanford University, Kansas State University and other universities said in a study published in Agricultural Water Management in 2020.
Source: eenews.net
Photo Credit: GettyImages-zhuda
Categories: Kansas, Weather