It’s common for Dave Bedenbender to cull a few of his older beef cows each year. This year’s tortuously hot and dry weather may force him to be more aggressive.
Hay at $125 for a big bale and pond levels dropping by the day make maintaining a beef herd through the winter months difficult, Bedenbender allowed Monday afternoon, as his pickup truck bounced through a pasture that should have been green with fall fescue.
“Looks like western Kansas,” he said of the barren field.
“It all comes down to dollars,” he continued. “Cows don’t put on any weight in the winter. It’s just a matter of maintaining them and keeping them healthy for calving. It takes a big bale per cow per month and about $9 worth of protein.”
That adds up quickly for his 50-head herd.
With every snowfall, cows turn to the readily available hay bales.
“The pond moisture is going to be the big problem,” Bedenbender lamented. “Some ponds are dry and more will be in a week or two. Others will freeze dry if it gets too cold.”
Another hazard of the receding water line coupled with the upcoming cold weather is the amount of mud cows have to maneuver through to reach a pond. Sometimes the exertion is so much the weaker animals flounder and can die.
“We’ve had to start feeding earlier this year than usual,” Bedenbender noted, with pastures having burned to a crisp.
“You can figure most winters on feeding for five months, but it’ll probably be six this year, even more for some,” he said. “If you have to haul water it’s really going to get expensive,” with a beef cow drinking 10 to 15 gallons in a day’s time.
“It may get to the point that you’ll just have to put a pencil to it, and if it isn’t financially feasible you’ll have to sell off cows,” he said. “If it doesn’t rain, I’m not going to put as many on pasture next spring.”
Hay isn’t an immediate concern for Bedenbender, and won’t be provided winter doesn’t set in early with a vengeance.
“I think I’ll have enough,” he said. “If I don’t, I don’t know whether there will be any to buy. A lot of the older hay was sold off earlier,” and this year’s crop was depressed by the drought and heat.
If the blistering cloud that was summer has a silver lining, it is that many ponds have been dug out, expanded to hold more water when rain does come.
IN NEARLY 40 years of farming, Bedenbender doesn’t remember a year as dry as this one.
“I’ve never raised two-bushel beans before,” he said. “What killed us were all those 100-degree days.”
Marvin Lynch, at the Piqua Cooperative, said the fall harvest essentially was over.
Corn averaged 25 to 30 bushels an acre and soybeans nine to 10, he said, a third or less of normal for both crops.
“There were a few strips, maybe four of five miles long, that got some pretty good rains at the right time and there was some 50-bushel corn there,” but that was a rarity, he said.
Same was true with beans.
“Some beans didn’t get cut,” because projected yields were next to nothing, while “there also were a few fields where they made up to 30 bushels,” Lynch said.
Bedenbender thinks location had a role in some yields being better, in fields that were protected from the hot winds of July and August.
WHILE THE drought’s effects on agriculture are significant, Allen County Extension Agent Carla Nemecek said lawns and gardens also took a beating. She said trees and shrubbery should get a good dose of water before they go dormant.
“Lawns already are dormant, but there’s still time to water trees, particularly young ones, and shrubs,” she said. “Also, if you’re planting bulbs, give them a good watering, along with any perennial flowers and plants.”
She added that with nights getting colder it was a good idea to drain hoses left outdoors to keep them from being damaged by water freezing.
CHANCE OF rain is 50 percent Wednesday and 80 percent after midnight, the forecast promises.
Wednesday of last week, the forecast was much the same, only a smidgen less likely at 70 percent. The result, a trace of rain barely wet the pavement.
That’s the way it has been this the year. Through the first five months, rain came about as expected and by the end of May the total was 1.20 inches ahead of normal at 15.29.
Then Mother Nature closed the spigot.
October’s total was .32 of an inch, the third driest October in the past century. The driest was 1952, with just a trace.
In the past five months the Iola area has had just 7.98 inches of rain, with the shortage complicated by hotter than normal temperatures that included 15 days of 100 or more and 55 others of 90 or more. Only four times this year has more than an inch of rain fallen in a day, and just once, 1.13 on Sept. 18, since June 1.
The not-so-good news: November and December traditionally don’t have much moisture.
