Historic drought in the West is forcing ranchers to take painful measures

 On Andrew McGibbon’s 90,000-acre cattle ranch south  Tucson, Arizona, the West’s punishing drought isn’t just drying up pastureland and evaporating water troughs.

“We're having the death of trees like I've never seen in my lifetime. Thousands of trees are dying,” he says of species that have adapted to Arizona’s desert landscape, such as oak and mesquite.

Nearly 1,000 miles from McGibbon’s ranch, near Rio Vista, California, the drought on Ryan Mahoney’s ranch feels just as bad.

“According to my grandpa, who is 92 this year, this is the worst he’s ever seen in the Montezuma Hills,” Mahoney says. “Typical rainfall is 16 to 18 inches. We got three to five inches this year, and [the impact] is pretty drastic and dramatic.”

McGibbon and Mahoney, who both raise Angus beef cattle, have been forced to sell off parts of their herds, either to feedlots, where cattle gain weight before slaughter, or to other ranches as far east as Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, where drought hasn’t dried up pastures.

It’s one dramatic impact of the drought that is gripping the U.S. West, stretching from California to New Mexico and parts of Colorado. In the contiguous United States, more than a third of available land is used for pasture. That means more than 15 million beef cattle are trying to graze this year on drought-parched grasses, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures. Weekly USDA reports show slaughter rates up compared to this time last year, but Shayle Shagam, a livestock expert for the USDA, says that, in addition to the drought, those numbers could also reflect a catch-up in inventories from last year’s COVID-19 supply chain disruptions...MORE