Cassie LeMaster 0:01

Welcome back to the Extension Connection. I'm Cassie, your Polk County Equine and Livestock Extension Agent. If you're listening to this from your tractor or your truck, you already know what today's episode is about. The only things truly thriving right now are fire ants and our collective anxiety about the hay market. We are staring down a historic dry spell. The North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council just updated the maps, and a majority of the western half of North Carolina is under an extreme drought designation. Our fescue pastures are struggling right now, and we've had very little growth from our warm season grasses. We had a dry winter, a hot, rainless spring, and now we're staring down the barrel of summer. If you raise cattle, goats, sheep, or horses on this heavy red clay, you know that when it dries out, it turns into a brick. Our clay soils have an incredible water-holding capacity when it does rain, but once they bake out, getting moisture back into that ground is a long, slow process. So today, we're focusing entirely on drought management strategies for our region. We're going to talk about grazing, avoiding toxic traps in your forage, water safety, and making the hard business choices before the weather forces your hand. First, let's start with the most obvious casualty out there, the grass. Your fields are likely looking parched right now. Your animals are looking at you like you owe them money, and left to their own devices, they will nibble every single blade of grass down to the bare dirt. But we have to fight the urge to let them do that. The golden rule of grazing management right now is simple. Never graze cool season grasses below three to four inches. I know what some of you are thinking. My pastures don't even have three inches of growth total right now, and that's exactly where the danger lies. When a plant is stressed, its root system shrinks to mirror what's happening above the ground. If your animals scalp that plant down to the dirt, two terrible things happen. First, you completely destroy the remaining root structure. When the rain does finally come, that plant won't be able to recover, and you'll be left with a field full of weeds this fall. Second, you expose bare soil to the blazing sun, baking out whatever microscopic moisture is left and inviting potential erosion. So what do you do when you can't let them graze it down, but you don't have enough grass? You use what we call a sacrifice lot or a dry lot if you have one. You pick one sacrificial pasture or an established dry lot. This can be a heavily shaded paddock or a small pasture that's already degraded that you need to renovate anyways, and you confine your animals there. You bring the feed and the water to them. By doing this, you're locking the animals out of your remaining pastures. You're protecting the crowns of your tall fescue, orchard grass, or Bermuda grass so that those grasses can survive to grow once the rain does return. It's a hard pill to swallow. It breaks your heart to look at a field that just has a little bit of green fuzz and not be able to turn them out. But you have to think of it as an investment in your future forage growth. If you do happen to have some growth and you're utilizing rotational grazing, the rule right now is to graze them fast across those pastures. Keep them moving through quickly so they don't have time to consume any of the regrowth. But the moment those stands get down to that three-to-four-inch mark across the board, you have to stop grazing. Do not rotate them into a pasture that has not recovered yet. If you rotate animals through five pastures that are all stunted, you're just killing five pastures at the same time instead of saving four and sacrificing one. Don't be afraid either to get creative with your feed sources when your animals are dry lotted. Maybe this is a time to start a kudzu control business with your goat herd, or offer certain downed trees as a forage source. Mulberry, elm, tulip poplar, and willow trees are safe options to offer livestock. Do not allow access to black walnut or maple or wild cherry trees, as wilting leaves from those trees can cause cyanide poisoning. Now, it's bad enough that there's no grass, but the grass that is out there can actually be dangerous right now. We need to talk about the toxic traps of a drought, starting first with Kentucky 31 tall fescue. Kentucky 31 is incredibly tough. It handles our clay and our heat better than most cool season grasses, but it carries an endophyte fungus. In a normal year, fescue toxicosis is something that we learn to manage. In a drought year, it can become a crisis. When fescue is stressed, those endophyte toxins concentrate, particularly in the seed heads. This causes vasoconstriction, which narrows the animal's blood vessels. For cattle and horses, that means they can't regulate their body temperature, leading to severe heat stress. You'll see cattle standing in ponds all day long just trying to cool off or panting heavily under trees. For pregnant mares, it's even worse. It can cause prolonged gestation, thickened placentas, and aglactia, meaning they won't produce milk for the foal. If you have animals on fescue right now, you can clip off the seed heads, but be sure not to mow too low. Six inches or higher is best. More importantly, provide permanent deep shade and clean, cool water. If you're grazing cattle on infected fescue stands, consider supplementing them with protein tubs to dilute the toxin intake. This is also the perfect time to look at coat shedding. NC State Extension specialists recommend evaluating your herd on a one to five hair shedding scale. A score of one means a slick, short summer coat. A five means they look like a wooly mammoth. Right now in May, cattle should be shed out. If you have animals failing to shed, those are animals struggling the most with fescue toxins and heat stress. Write their ear tag numbers down. They are your prime candidates for the culling list if you need to downsize. Beyond fescue, and more importantly, we have to watch out for nitrate poisoning. When plants are drought stressed, they can't process nitrogen normally. They absorb it from the soil, but because they aren't growing, that nitrogen accumulates as nitrates in the plant. This happens heavily in warm season annuals like sorghum sudangrass and even common weeds like pigweed and johnsongrass. If an animal eats those high nitrate plants, it converts to nitrites in the rumen, which prevents the blood from carrying oxygen. The animal can literally suffocate from the inside out. To prevent this, do two things. First, if you're cutting emergency hay or grazing suspect fields, get a nitrate test. Your local extension office can help you get a sample to the NCDA lab. It's cheap, and it can save lives. Second, if you're grazing, don't let them graze the plants down too low because the nitrates live in the bottom few inches of the stem. And please never apply nitrogen fertilizer during a drought. The grass can't use it, and you're just loading a toxic gun for when it does rain. Research actually shows that nitrate levels peak two to three days after a drought-ending rain. Also, nitrate levels do not dissipate in dried forage, so testing levels before cutting could be beneficial as well. For my horse owners listening, keep in mind that johnsongrass is bad news for horses for a different reason Johnson grass and sorghum species can develop prussic acid or cyanide when stressed. Horses should never graze Johnson grass. If it wilts due to severe drought stress, it releases a toxic prussic acid. Keep all livestock away from it until it's completely dried out or fully recovered. Now let's talk about water. Whether your farm relies on automated waters hooked up to a well or a natural creek running through a back pasture, drought changes the game. Water quantity is the obvious issue, but water quality is what catches most people off guard. When creeks and ponds drop, the water slows down and warms up. That is the absolute perfect breeding ground for blue-green algae or cyanobacteria. It is incredibly toxic. If animals drink from a pond with blue-green algae bloom, which often looks like green paint spilled on the water or a pea soup scum, it can cause sudden death, liver failure or severe neurological issues. If your pond looks suspicious, fence the animals out immediately. There's also the physical danger of mud. When water levels drop, that pond edge turns into a deep sucking mud. Forced wading into stagnant water increases the risk of foot rot and introduces heavy bacteria loads to udders, leading to mastitis. The goal here is to restrict access to muddy pond edges and stagnant creeks. Pipe the water to a trough if you can, or use temporary fencing to keep them on a solid bank. For horse owners using automatic waters or troughs, be sure to check them daily. In high heat and drought, horses drink significantly more water, up to fifteen to twenty gallons a day for an average adult horse. If a well pump fails or a float valve gets stuck, a horse can dehydrate dangerously fast, leading to impaction colics. Now let's talk about the business side of this. Hay harvests will be sparse this year, with many reporting about a fifty percent yield from what is typical, and prices will climb in response. If you're looking at your barn and realizing you don't have enough forage to get through a prolonged drought, you need to do an audit immediately. Also, don't wait until this fall to secure your hay for this year. Figure out exactly how many head of livestock you have, what their daily dry matter intake needs are, and what you have on hand. If there's a deficit, you have two choices Buy expensive feed shipped from out of state, or reduce the number of mouths you have to feed. Reducing the herd, culling is a hard word to hear. You've spent years building up your genetics, but sometimes it's the only way to save the farm. Look at it this way, a drought is an aggressive management tool that forces you to optimize your herd efficiency. NC State Extension has a fantastic set of strategic culling criteria for beef cattle, which applies to sheep and goats as well. You may want to sort your animals into a keep and cull list based on strict productivity metrics. First down the road should be your open cows or heifers. If she didn't get pregnant during the breeding season, she's eating your expensive hay for free. This is a cow that needs to say goodbye. Next, look at animals with a history of calving difficulties, prolapses or poor udders. Then look at performance. Any cow that weaned a calf that didn't meet your weight goals or an animal with a bad disposition. Aggressive animals take up energy and resources you simply can't afford to waste right now. Go ahead and add those late shedding wooly mammoths to the list too. On the flip side, you keep the cows that are pregnant, that shed early in the spring, that maintain a good body condition score, ideally around a five or six, and those with proven sound genetics. For horse owners, culling isn't usually an option because our horses are often pets or athletes rather than production units. But for you, the hard choice might mean leasing out a horse, sending a young horse out for training elsewhere, or adjusting your feed budget. It might mean substituting a portion of your hay ration with alternative fiber sources like beet pulp or pelleted hay rations if local square bales get too expensive or too scarce. The key to all of this is acting early. If you sell your cull livestock now, you get ahead of the market drop that happens when everyone panics and dumps their herds at the stockyard at the same time. You preserve your cash flow, and you save your pasture from being utterly destroyed. I know this has been a heavier conversation, but look at it this way, executing a plan gives you control. It's easy to look at a dry sky and feel helpless, but setting up that sacrifice lot, checking your water quality- Testing for nitrates and looking critically at your stocking rates gives you a roadmap. Resiliency isn't about preventing the drought. It's about managing your resources so that when the weather pattern breaks, and it will break, your soil, your core herd, and your bank account can bounce back quickly. If you want more details on the hair shedding charts, nitrate testing kits, or information for feed testing labs, drop by your local NC State Extension County Center. We have specialists standing by ready to help you analyze your forage, test your water, and calculate your feed budgets. Don't face this dry spell alone. That's all for today's episode. Keep your chin up, keep your water troughs full, and stay off that short grass. I'm Cassie LeMaster. Tune in next month for the next episode of the Extension Connection podcast.