Cattle farmers brace for the cold after drought, high feed costs

It could be a long, lean winter in cattle country as drought-ravaged western Canadian ranchers struggle to secure feed to get their livestock through the cold months.

It could be a long, lean winter in cattle country as drought-ravaged western Canadian ranchers struggle to secure feed to get their livestock through the cold months.

Near the town of Eastend in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan, Jocelyn Wasko and her husband Travis have spent much of the summer and fall preparing. They’ve worked hard to grow their own forage crops, even taking a few thousand acres of durum wheat that didn’t grow well enough to sell and cutting and baling it for feed instead.

Still, after five consecutive years of very little rain on the property that Travis’ family has been ranching for more than a century, the parched land can only produce so much. That’s why the couple made the tough decision last year to downsize their herd, culling close to 20 per cent of their cows by sending them to slaughter at weaning time.

“We really had no option when we finished out the year last year – all the dugouts were empty and there was no grass,” Wasko said in a recent interview.

“And it’s really expensive to truck feed into this area. The freight is just killing us.”

Across large swathes of the country, extreme heat and dry conditions have taken a toll on agricultural production this year.

As of Sept. 30, according to Agriculture Canada’s most recent update, 72 per cent of the country and 69 per cent of Canada’s agricultural landscape was considered either “abnormally dry” or in “moderate to exceptional drought.”

But drought’s effects aren’t felt only in the summer. For cattle producers, winter is when the toll can be most severe, as animals’ caloric needs are higher and grazing land is frozen or snow-covered.