With drought building from western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles through the southern two thirds of Colorado, the northern half of New Mexico and on into Utah, Nevada, northern California, Oregon and Washington, it is good to keep up with what pasture conditions are doing.
Those pasture conditions are released each week by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service as part of the weekly crop conditions report. They then are graphed by the Livestock Marketing Information Center in Denver.
Watching pasture conditions is particularly instructive early in the growing season because market analysts have said that grass conditions show dry soils faster than row crops or even cereal crops because many of them are either irrigated and/or the new crop varieties are much more drought tolerant than they used to be.
Pastures usually don’t get pampered.
DROUGHT MONITOR
The weekly Drought Monitor map, which comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursdays, showed the worst areas of drought to be in southwestern Kansas into eastern Colorado with another patch in south-central Colorado dipping into northern New Mexico. A third strip is in western Oregon and north-western California with a small patch in north-central Oregon.
Those patches were rated as D3, or extreme drought, areas. The only worse designation is a D4, or exceptional drought, rating.
Surrounding and connecting the D3 drought areas were large swaths of D2, or severe, drought, NOAA said.
NOAA also said the rain that fell in the west fell north of those drought-affected areas. Warmer-than-normal temperatures were common across the intermountain west, NOAA said.
In western Utah, severe drought expanded westward because of worsened short- and long-term precipitation deficits, NOAA said. Severe drought expanded northward in central Idaho where streamflow had become very low in the Big Lost River area.
Farther northward in Idaho, and in adjacent parts of northeast Oregon and southeast Washington, rain lessened dry soil problems and improved stream flows, NOAA said.
RANGE AND PASTURE CONDITIONS STEADY
Unlike row crops, where market analysts and traders monitor the good-to-excellent conditions, pasture conditions are monitored from the standpoint of the total poor and very poor conditions. Average-to-excellent pastures and ranges can support the cattle and sheep that are grazed on them.
Since the beginning of May, the total percent of pastures and ranges in the poor or very poor categories of NASS have held at 16% each week. Last year, pastures were rated from 6% to 8% poor to very poor, so pastures this year are more than twice as bad off as they were last year.
In fact, they’re even worse than average. For the five years from 2014 to 2018, weekly pasture conditions through May ranged from 13.20% poor to very poor to 14.80% poor to very poor.
Western region grasslands were rated from 14.13% poor or very poor to $19.39%, NASS said. Last year, they ranged from 7.25% poor to very poor to 11.88%, and the average range was 21.73% to $22.60.
CATTLE, BEEF RECAP
Fed cattle trading was reported last week at $112 to $120 per cwt on a live basis, steady to down $5 from the previous week, and at $178 to $190 on a dressed basis, steady to up $3.
The USDA choice cutout Friday was down $6.22 per cwt at $363.34, while select was off $4.02 at $340.07. The choice/select spread narrowed to $23.27 from $25.47 with 74 loads of fabricated product sold into the spot market.
The CME Feeder Cattle index for the seven days ended Thursday was $129.36 per cwt, up $2.34. This compares with Friday’s Aug contract settlement of $135.35, down $0.15.