Historically low snowpack and drought in the West this year have brought a myriad of complications for the agricultural industry. As irrigation season begins, this winter’s drought and record-high temperatures are creating a stark reality for Oregon’s farmers, ranchers and water managers as they look to the coming summer.
We’ll hear from Jeremy McCulloch, a rancher in Wallowa County, and Gordon Jones, an agronomist with Oregon State University’s Extension Service, to discuss the challenges of this year’s irrigation season.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As irrigation season begins, farmers and ranchers will have to reckon with historic low snowpack and recent record high temperatures. It could lead to serious water challenges this summer and fall.
We’re going to get a few perspectives on this right now. Jeremy McCulloch is a rancher in Wallowa County. He is at Rocking M Cattle Company. Gordon Jones is a Prineville-based agronomist with Oregon State University’s Extension Service. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Jeremy McCulloch: Thanks for having me.
Gordon Jones: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Jeremy, first – can you give us a sense for your operation in Wallowa?
McCulloch: We actually are a registered cattle breeder. We raise registered Texas Longhorns, one of the largest breeders in the west of that breed. We grow our own hay as well, and obviously manage pastures. We’re pretty self-contained. We’ve done some large water projects, and run both irrigated and dry farming ground with a pretty diverse herd. But most of our business goes back to direct consumer beef sales and registered cattle sales.
Miller: So, unlike a cow calf operation we’ve talked about in the past, a big part of your business is raising bulls, say, so that other folks can buy them for their own breeding?
McCulloch: That’s one of our markets, yeah. We sell usually about 50 to 60% of our bull crop to other breeders. And then we sell females at all times as well, bred heifers, occasionally bred cows. Then we process any bulls that don’t make the cut, in our own in-house beef program. So most of our business is private treaty versus your public markets. We also, like I say, retail beef, USDA-inspected, direct to consumers regionally with some wholesale agreements as well.
Miller: How much do you rely on snowpack, on snow melt?
McCulloch: It’s really relative. So, our main ranch in the valley is fortunate. About 50% of it’s got irrigation rights, and we have a new pivot system. We worked with the Oregon Water Resources Department and NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Services) to install that with a local contractor. And that’s a game changer from an efficiency and growth standpoint. In terms of our dry pastures though, we’re incredibly dependent on the snowpack. And more important even than the snowpack is the residual precipitation we get throughout the winter and into the early spring which, this year like you mentioned, has been pretty warm. So that’s where one of our biggest concerns lies right now.
But it ties hand in hand with the snowpack directly. It really goes down to the irrigation ditches, if you will, ditches and ditch companies, when and if they’re gonna have to restrict and or shut off water. We’re a little fortunate to have a pretty efficient system in now. But when those other pastures dry up, related to the weather we’re having, we have to go back to that lower ground. And if the water’s then shut off, it becomes an exponential problem. There’s many producers in this part of the world that operate similarly. They like to be out on dry range in the summer.
It’s gonna vary year to year, but there’s already a lot of concerns. Even late last year, people were coming in earlier than normal with cattle. There’s quite a few concerns about how long range ground’s gonna last, right now and the availability of certain producers to even have valley access. Particularly with cow calf operations, and your heavier commercial breeds, are going to take quite a bit of forage daily to maintain and grow. Definitely some people are on pins and needles for sure.
Miller: Gordon, can you put the snowpack in context? How bad is it right now statewide compared to recent averages?
Jones: Most of my work is based in the Deschutes Basin in Central Oregon. I was looking at the NRCS – the Natural Resources Conservation Service – snowpack data just this morning. And normally, at this time of year in the Deschutes Basin, we’d have about 18.0 inches of snow water equivalent, just like water in the snow. And today we’ve got less than 1.5 inches. It’s the lowest amount of snowpack that we’ve had in the Deschutes Basin, on record for this date of the year. So yeah, unprecedented in that regard. We’ve had a very warm winter and not much of the precipitation we’ve had has fallen as snow. And what has, to a great degree, has melted reasonably quickly.
Miller: What are you hearing from farmers and ranchers in the Deschutes Basin about this?
Jones: Definitely challenging. We’ve had a number of years of drought running back over about the past decade. Most of our crop agriculture is irrigated, is reliant on either snowpack or runoffs that end up in the Deschutes and Crooked Rivers. Crop prices are a challenge today, as are costs of fuel and other inputs. And to then have such a constraint on water is putting folks in a challenging position to decide what to do with the crops they currently have in the ground and what crops to plant to figure out how to stay viable through the growing season.
Miller: Jeremy, I’m glad Gordon brought that up because just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had conversations with other farmers about the increase in fuel costs. Obviously, it’s something that everybody in all of society is dealing with. But farmers and ranchers can often be very dependent on diesel and other fuel just for their operations. All that is in addition to price increases for fertilizer or other inputs. What happens when you combine all of these?
McCulloch: Well, it makes you really have to … there’s a reason why beef is at an all-time high in correlation to this. In particular, animal protein is not cheap to produce in any way, shape or form. So that’s gonna correlate, perhaps drag a little behind, but be sustained at probably a higher level than the average consumer is used to paying historically. So that’s number one is prices go up, whether it’s market demand or internally. For beef that we sell retail and our wholesale contracts, we’ve gone from biannual adjustments on pricing, [to] we’ve had to shift those to a hard quarterly adjustment, just to make sure we’re keeping up with butcher inputs and then our transport back and forth for fuel in particular.
Really, this summer is when we’ll have a better idea in terms of the fuel problem, because we burn the most diesel when we’re putting up hay; traveling, delivering cattle in the summer, things like that. Hopefully this fuel situation’s international issue has some type of ceiling from a pricing standpoint. Hopefully we’ll realize that and then start to move back down. Whether that’s optimistic or not, I think a lot of people are holding off on bulk purchases as long as they can, because the bulk discount is pretty substantial if you start getting several thousand gallons of fuel. But even the farm diesel, which is diet diesel you can burn in any equipment, is substantially higher than any of us is used to paying.
So you really have to weigh all your inputs. You’ve gotta look at the cost of fertilizing the field, particularly your nitrogen-based fields that are gonna be your grasses and other crops. You’ve gotta make sure if you don’t have water, you’re not gonna burn it up with the lack of precipitation and that you’re working with an agronomist like Gordon to make sure that you’re doing the right things. On fields like alfalfa, where you have more potassium and boron, phosphorus inputs, perhaps sulfur, depending on the soil type, you’re gonna be looking at the cost coefficient of where that real break-even is.
I know some people have gone from an every year to an every other year model. Some people just can’t fertilize, particularly the legume crops. So it’s just weighing out what makes sense. It’ll also probably lead to people unloading more females, so bred cows and pairs. In the fall, if the price of hay is too high due to those inputs, then you’ll see sell-offs. And that’s gonna also sustain cattle and beef prices, probably, being more expensive. Not only due to the cost of production of that piece of meat, if you will, but also just the impact it’s gonna have on the market from a supply and demand standpoint. With our national herd already so low, something has to give for us to start to climb out of this vacuum in the beef and really the general agricultural world.
Miller: Gordon, what Jeremy was talking about, there’s a lot there. But what really stood out to me is the possibility that ranchers or farmers could actually change the way they operate, change what they’re applying to crops, maybe even change what they’re growing or the size of their herds if they’re ranchers. What kinds of changes in operations are you hearing about right now?
Jones: It is a difficult calculus to make, to try to understand what best should be done with a piece of ground and with the water that is available and scarce. We’re certainly seeing folks thinking through this season. For those farmers who are producing our perennial hay crops, grass and alfalfa, [they are] making plans to reduce the number of cuttings that they would take. Farmers will harvest somewhere between two, commonly three, sometimes four cuttings of hay through the growing season. But as water gets scarce, they’ll probably ramp that down and that’ll result in reduced yields.
Oregon is such a fascinating place to be involved with agriculture because we have such diversity of different crops that are grown, and in many cases are specific, region by region within the state. So, as I look to my north in Jefferson County, farmers there produce a range of higher value specialty crops. Some in Crook County here as well, like carrot seed and bluegrass seed. Those tend to be higher value crops in terms of potential income, and also a little bit lower on water use.
So over recent years, we’ve seen a real reduction in some of the other crops like grass, hay and alfalfa, some of the small grains like wheat and a shift in focus towards those higher dollar specialty crops that require somewhat less water to produce. Folks, I think, are looking every day for what that next crop might be that would have meaningful economic returns and fit into the water constraints that we’re seeing today and expect to see in future seasons to come.
Miller: Jeremy, are you thinking about a major shift? Are you contemplating a major shift in how you and your family run the ranch?
McCulloch: Well, we did that about 20 years ago when we decided to raise a specialty breed of cattle, quite frankly. So in terms of crop production, we’re very limited in Wallowa County with the growing season, as to what’s actually viable. You’re pretty much limited to your grain crops if you’re gonna be in that industry. We’re not, and we haven’t really seriously entertained entering into that world, with being still a cow calf [operation]. I should say we do have a herd of commercial cattle that we run alongside our registered herd. So we are involved in that market as well.
We have alfalfa and orchard grass blends for the most part in this county. You’re gonna have other timothy [hay] producers and things like that in a few specialty markets. Obviously with international markets, that ebbs and flows some. But for the most part you’re gonna be grasses, grains, and then alfalfa, a little bit of targeted clover production. There’s [also] some growing interest in things like flax and some other crops. Some of the grain country is going that direction a little bit.
But for the most part, there’s not really a way to change the crops, in our situation. One thing we would consider, if input got too heavy to produce the hay, you have to weigh the hay market and then you consider utilizing those fields longer term for a heavier denser grass. That’s really the main shift you could see there on irrigated ground. But we’re still quite a ways from that break even being cheaper to buy hay than to produce at least the maximum we can. But if you have to keep your cattle numbers at a certain point, at some point, you have to weigh that input as well.
So I hope that answers your question. But people in Union County and certainly down in Malheur County, other parts of Eastern Oregon, are going to have a much broader growing season than we are here in Wallowa County with the temperatures. So they would probably be more likely to be able to experiment versus producers here.
Miller: Jeremy and Gordon, thanks very much.
Jones: Thank you, my pleasure.
McCulloch: Thank you.
Miller: Jeremy McCulloch is a rancher at Rocking M Cattle Company in Wallowa. Gordon Jones is an Extension agronomist at Oregon State University. He’s based in Prineville.
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