Kansas rancher implements drought mitigation plan to survive third year drought

Here's how one Kansas rancher is dealing with a third year of drought conditions and below normal precipitation.

Map of Kansas drought conditions
Photo:

U.S. Drought Monitor

It’s been a third year of drought conditions and below normal precipitation in some parts of Kansas, causing one rancher to implement his drought mitigation plan to keep his operation going.

Philip Weltmer, a commercial cow/calf rancher from Smith Center, Kansas, says that three years in a row of below normal rainfall have depleted his operation’s moisture supplies. As a result, he’s had to make some decisions to keep his operation going throughout the continued drought. 

The latest drought monitor map for Kansas shows an improvement in drought conditions from the beginning of 2023. When the year started, 37% of Kansas was in D4 exceptional drought. As the year ends, none of the state’s acres are in D4 exceptional drought, 3% is in D3 extreme drought, 17% is in D2 severe drought, 34% is in D1 moderate drought, and 26% is abnormally dry. The remaining 20% of the state’s acres are free from drought stress.

Map and table of Kansas drought conditions

U.S. Drought Monitor

One of those decisions included selling all of the cattle that were 10 years old and above to mitigate drought pressure on his pastures, Weltmer says. He says that decision has helped allow the cattle he has left to have enough grass. 

This is especially helpful, Weltmer says, because another year of drought meant a limited hay supply. “We got about a third of our hay crop as usual,” Weltmer says. 

Weltmer also grows about 6,000 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat. He’s had to resort to baling corn stalks for roughage to feed his cattle. Last winter Weltmer says that his hay supply ended up mostly depleted. 

Right now, Weltmer says his pastures are actually looking better than they have in the previous two years. He says this is because he limited grazing this year and had two-thirds of his normal size herd grazing the pastures, “so we didn’t overgraze most of our pastures.”

There is one pasture that Weltmer admits was grazed longer than he had wanted to, so it will now need to rest a little longer before he puts cattle back on it. 

When it comes to his soil moisture supplies, Weltmer says there’s no reserve water supplies. “You dig down as far as you can,” he says, “and it’s dry and powdery. We can’t even pump water out of the wells because they’re so low.”

Six inches of rain this summer was the only thing that prevented Weltmer from having to haul water to his cattle all year long. That 6 inches of rain that came on June 1 helped fill ponds, Weltmer says, but “nothing really went into the subsoil.”

That rainfall event also helped some of Weltmer’s crops do okay, he says. “We made some grain but had some fields that were under 10 bushels per acre (bpa) in the dryland corn,” Weltmer says. 

A drought stricken corn field in August in Kansas
A drought stricken Kansas corn field in August 2023.

Philip Weltmer

Because of the cold winters in Kansas, Weltmer says he also grows straw to bale for bedding to keep his cattle off the cold ground. Due to the lack of rainfall this year, Weltmer says he was only able to get 46 bales of straw, “insanely less” than his normal nearly 600 bales. 

Before a recent rain came through, Weltmer says he was able to get 319 bales of corn stalks to help serve as bedding for his cattle. Now, though, the fields, while not frozen over, are too muddy to get anymore work done, Weltmer says.

“We got four to five inches of snow on Christmas Day,” Weltmer says, which will help add moisture to his depleted soil and wells. “It’s a sloppy mess, but everybody says ‘we’ll take the mud.’ Everybody’s willing to deal with this mud for a while. Hopefully it keeps coming because it’s going to take some time to build back our reserve.”

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