How severe drought is crushing ranchers in N.D.
‘The worst thing I can ever remember’
TOWNER, N.D. — Darrell Rice stood in a field of corn he’d planted in early June, to be harvested in the fall and chopped up to feed the hundreds of cows and calves he raises in central North Dakota.
“It should be 6, 7, 8 foot tall,” he said, looking down at the stunted plants at his feet, their normally floppy leaves rolled tight against their stalks to conserve water in the summer heat.
Like ranchers across the state, Mr. Rice is suffering through an epic drought as bad as or worse than anywhere else in this season of extreme weather in the Western half of the country.
A lack of snow last winter and almost no spring rain have created the driest conditions in generations. Ranchers are being forced to sell off portions of herds they have built up for years, often at fire-sale prices, to stay in business.
Some won’t make it. “It’s a really bad situation,” said Randy Weigel, a cattle buyer, who said this drought may force some older ranchers to retire. “They’ve worked all their lives to get their cow herd to where they want, and now they don’t have enough feed to feed them.”
Since December, in the weekly maps produced by
the U.S. Drought Monitor, all of North Dakota has been colored in shades of yellow, orange and red, symbolizing various degrees of drought. And since mid-May, McHenry County, where Mr. Rice ranches and farms, has been squarely in the middle of a swath of the darkest red, denoting the
most extreme conditions.
The period from January 2020 to this June has been the driest 18 months in McHenry and 11 other counties in the state since modern recordkeeping began 126 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I’ve been ranching for 47
years, and then this year had to come along,” said John Marshall, who ranches with his son, Lane, not far from Mr. Rice in this sprawling county where the county seat, Towner, bills itself as the cattle capital of North Dakota. “It’s the worst thing I can ever remember.”
Drought conditions that are affecting nearly half the land area of the lower 48 states are helping send beef prices higher in America’s grocery stores.
But ranchers here say they aren’t seeing that money — slaughterhouses and other middlemen are. If anything, the ranchers said, they are losing money because they are getting less from the forced sale of their animals.
The Marshalls have already sold about 100 cows and plan to sell at least another 120, which would leave them with about two-thirds of their usual herd. “Never had to do it before,” Mr. Marshall said.
Mr. Rice’s corn, which is stored as silage to feed his animals later in the year, is so short that if he tried to harvest it now, he couldn’t. “It’s unchoppable,” he said.
If he gets some rain he still would be looking at a shortage of feed and would very likely have to have his cows weighed at the communal ranchers’ scale off Main Street in Towner and then sold to a buyer elsewhere.
“If we don’t get silage,” he said, “the cows are going to town.”
Rachel Wald, who works for North Dakota State University advising and supporting ranchers, said that livestock auction houses, called sale barns, have been very busy this spring and summer. “We’ve got 2,000 critters heading down the road each week” in the county, she said. By some estimates, half the cattle in the state may be gone by fall.
At a recent sale at Kist Livestock Auction in Mandan, just across the Missouri River from Bismarck, ranchers in pickup trucks, trailers in tow, lined up to unload cattle they couldn’t afford to keep.
Tom Fettig and his wife, Kim, were there with 60 yearlings, about half of a herd they were helping their son raise.
The animals had been bought in February with the goal of fattening them until October, when they would be sold to a feedlot.
The drought ruined those plans. “We’ve only had them out on pasture since June 1,” Mr. Fettig said. “And there’s nothing left.”
“There’s a nice set of steers right off the prairie,” Mr. Horner announced as the Fettigs’ animals crowded the ring in two groups of 30. They sold for about $1,250 apiece — perhaps $150 a head less, Mr. Fettig said, than if they’d been able to feed them all summer.