White County farmers say drought, inflation 'double whammy' forcing cattle sales, culls and more water usage

“We’re always, it seems like, two weeks out from a drought if we don’t start getting rain,” White County Cooperative Extension Service Agent-Staff Chairman Brian Haller said. “You will hear that old saying a lot that we’re always 10 days from a drought or two weeks from a drought.”

Haller said that statement is “pretty true” in areas where the soil is fairly shallow. “Now places that have pretty deep top soil, not so much true and so we have a little mix of both of that here.”

He said that the first hay cutting being off by around 50 percent is attributed “to it was just so cool and wet in the spring so we almost had too much rain.”

“Typically, the first cutting is the first of June or something like that but a lot of them are later than that because one, the grass wasn’t growing much and two, it was so wet,” Haller said. “And then, the thing is we went from kind of cooler temperatures with a lot of rain to 100-degree temperatures and no rain, so that first cutting was off 50 percent, probably not by the drought, [but] by other weather conditions.

“And then our second cutting, we didn’t get any rain and then when you have these 100-degree days, there’s a lot of evaporation, so the moisture we had got sucked up pretty quick if you will, so the second cutting is way off if some of them [producers] get a second cutting.”

Haller said that because of how long “our winter was,” a lot of the county’s producers also “end up feeding all their hay so they are trying to build back their supplies.”

Shrinking cattle

A lot of the producers, Haller said, are culling really hard if they have a cow or an animal that has physical issues or is getting kind of old on the edge of being culled.

“I’ve heard some say they just aren’t going to have enough hay,” he said. “The [cattle] sales numbers are running fairly high.”

Randy Goodman, owner of Arkansas Cattle Auction on Booth Road, said, “We’ve already sold 25 percent more cattle than we did last year and lots of lots of cows … people are quitting and getting out of the business. It’s going to really affect our cattle industry in six or eight months; there’s not going to be many calves because they are selling these cows off and most of these cows are going to slaughter.”

Goodman said he also has a cow-calf operation in White County.

“I’m under a situation, I own this cattle market and I’ve got to market these cattle the best I can for people and when you do that, sometimes you end up with quite a few extra cattle, and on that side of it, I just have to find the best way I can to feed them and hunt for cheaper commodities and try to take the best care I can of them,” he said.

He said when it comes to the drought conditions, “there’s nothing really good about it.” However, although he has seen past drought, “It’s a little different this time.”

“In 2012, you didn’t have all the economy stuff going on like you do now and fuel wasn’t quite as high then,” Goodman said. “People kind of, a few of them got back in. This time, I’m afraid a lot of them are not going to get back. It’s going to hurt them. It’s not just Arkansas, it’s going to hurt everybody when they go buy food at the store. Eventually, it’s going to make any kind of food really high, whether it’s beef or rice or whatever.”

Goodman said, though, that unless there is two more months of really bad heat, he doesn’t expect the drought in Arkansas will affect meat prices. “I don’t think it is that bad yet.”

Dana Stewart, a beef cattle and goat producer who lives in the Steprock community, said, “The whole scenario is very interesting because we were so wet earlier in the spring. It just rained so much and then when it stopped raining ... we started to notice things were dry, and certainly the heat contributed to that, so towards the end of June, things were looking pretty dry and it started to become a concern for us.”

As the heat has maintained with only “a small shower last week,” Stewart said “It has just been a realization that we’re very dry.”

A sixth-generation rancher, Stewart said, “our family has been raising cattle in Steprock for over 100 years.” She said she and her family have already reduced their cattle numbers by about 10 percent this year.

“We’ve got about 200 mama cows that we maintain. We’ve already sold 20 of those,” she said. “Thankfully, they are heading to other farmers and ranchers so they will still be in production, so that has reduced our numbers a little bit and then every day we are thinking about which is the next group to go.”

Looking back at past hard times when it comes to droughts, Stewart said 2012 is the one that sticks out most to her.

“I remember that was the year that it was just so dry, we ended up having to truck in hay from Mississippi, so thankfully we did that,” she said. “We still sold a lot of cows that year but we weren’t able to bring in a lot of hay. I have photos of the tractor going across the field in August and there’s just no grass.

“I would consider myself a younger producer and so where we are right now makes me think back to that time.”

Stewart said the area her ranch is in “needs 12-15 inches of rain to get out of this drought.

“... We are still feeding hay to some pastures. We will start feeding all pastures hay very soon, probably end of the week,” she said. “Because we use all of our available pasture for cattle, we purchase all of our hay. It’s not possible to make up for the hay that couldn’t be produced this summer. At best, we can hope for rain to grow cool-season grasses, but it won’t be enough for us.

“Fortunately for us, we have a lot of water and we can connect to city water when we need to, so right now, we’re OK with water.”

Goodman said for other farmers, “some of the water is pretty poor.”

“I’m lucky, I get to use city water on most of mine,” he said. “If you don’t have really good ponds or lakes, you know, some of these smaller ponds are drying up and when they do that, they have no choice but to sell them [cattle]. It’s a real thing. The numbers are real because we just looked at them this weekend. In our auction barn here, there’s been over 5,000 more cattle sold this year already versus this time last year.”

Drought.gov shows Monday that 77,076 people in White County are being affected by the drought. It states that it was the 40th “driest June on record” over the past 128 years, down 1.28 inches from normal.

Stewart said “one more drought level will qualify producers for some assistance, emergency loan-type things.”

The cutoff for data for the U.S. drought monitor maps is each Tuesday at 8 a.m. The maps are released every Thursday.

Stewart said the daily heat advisories “makes a bad situation even worse.”

“Arkansas’ ranchers are going to need assistance. Even when ranchers do everything right, we cannot break even in these situations,” she said. “For my family, we’ve spent over 100 years getting our herd to where it is. At the end of the day, it’s still a business. That emotional weight makes this a heavy burden for ranchers everywhere.”

Concerning how the drought will affect grocery prices, Stewart said it has to be kept in mind that there is a drought that has been going on in the West for a while and their cow numbers are down.

“Here you see the stories in the news about local livestock auctions being flooded with cattle so supply is going down and eventually, I’m afraid that will catch up to the supply and we will see those prices go up,” Stewart said. “Not only are we affected with the drought right now, our input costs are high right now. We’ve got high diesel, we’ve got high fertilizer, we’ve got high feed costs, and all those things will eventually be passed on to consumers, and unfortunately as farmers and ranchers, we don’t reap any of the rewards of that higher cost when it gets to the consumer because our input costs are so high right now.”

1980 comparisons

Bald Knob Mayor Barth Grayson, who is a hay farmer, believes the drought “is shaping up to be one of the worst droughts in our lifetime.”

“You compare everything to 1980, it’s still a cuss word to a farmer,” Grayson said. “If you look it up, it will say 41 days of a hundred or over degrees, consecutive, insane.”

He said anyone lucky enough to have irrigation for their hay “will reap the benefits of it this year.”

“Remember it stayed cold; it did not allow the grass to start growing early,” he said. “Bermuda grass started growing late that means that normal growing time was later this year. We like to get an early cutting of the hay and a second cutting and possibly a third cutting. But this year, most people only got a half-production on their first cutting. Some people got from a half to two-thirds.

John Hamilton, a White County row-crop producer of rice and soybeans who lives just outside of Searcy, said although his first crop was in 1998 and I said he has been in the business about 24 or 25 years, the 1980 drought is the one everybody talks about.

“I was just 5 years old then, but that’s the high-water mark for my lifetime and most everybody around heres lifetime,” he said. “This one [drought] here, I was very fortunate a week ago Sunday evening/Sunday morning, we got a2-inch rain on my farm between West Point and Griffithville and that was the saving grace. If we didn’t get that one, it would be really, really hard.”

He said toward middle to late June was when he started noticing the hot conditions were coming up on the farmers. “Around the 20th, the 25th of June” is when Hamilton said they started taking note of things concerning the drought with his reservoir started getting low.

Hamilton has three reservoirs that he irrigates crops with and has a couple of other wells that pump water out. He said the groundwater wells are safe and are not going to run out of water but they can only cover so much ground so fast. Without reservoir water to support them, he said he would not be able to keep up. He said if he did not get the rainfall he mentioned, he probably would have run out of water the first week of August.

“Talk about a bad year for this to happen,” Hamilton said, “with the price of farm diesel and fertilizer like it is, this is not the type of year to endure another hardship because the price to keep up our farm fuel and to keep this crop irrigated, the fertilizer, those things are double, they are 100 percent more then what they were last year. It was already going to be tough enough to make some money on the crop this year and you add in the drought and price of fuel.”

Haller said a majority of row-crop produces irrigate, “but comments I’m seeing and comments I’m hearing, we use a lot of surface water from reservoirs and so a lot of our reservoirs are at the levels they would be in August ... this was probably two weeks ago, they [producers] said it would be normally in August that it was that way in July so they are using a lot more water, which means their reservoirs are lower.”

Something else that affects the White County farmers, Haller said, is that if the nighttime temperatures are high, in the 90s or upper 80s, their plants don’t pollinate very well.

“It can affect the grain quality,” Haller said. “We kind of get a double-whammy there because our nighttime temperatures have been high and it’s hard to say what effect we are going to see, but most likely our yield or our grain quality is going to be off.”

Haller feels what the county is experiencing with this year’s drought is “very similar” to the one in 2012.

“I don’t know in 2012 that we had as much temperatures so that’s why a lot of people resonate this with 1980 because the temperatures, whereas 2012 we had high temps too and not any rain,” he said. “It’s right there with it in its own respect.”