Part 1
Ranch Drought Plan: What and Why
There are many reasons to plan for drought, some of which include:
- Drought has happened before and will happen again. Why not be ready for the inevitable?
- Planning can lead to more timely and more effective management during drought
- Planning for drought can save you money and increase profit
- Planning ahead reduces future stress
- Planning helps you respond to unexpected roadblocks
A drought plan can help ranchers make decisions and minimize losses. This fact sheet provides an overview of drought resilience and contingency plans for the ranch operation.
Part 2
Laying the Groundwork of Any Drought Plan
In this section, we lay the groundwork for drought planning. These elements are the foundation for both short-term contingency planning and long-term resilience planning, and are applicable to ranchers who use public, privately-owned or leased rangelands.
These steps include:
- Selecting your planning team
- Understanding past impacts of drought
- Taking stock of ranch resources
- Using scenarios to identify your operation’s strengths and weaknesses regarding drought
- Identifying your ranch vision and objectives for drought preparedness
WorkSheets
Worksheet 1
Including partners in your planning efforts can play an important role in helping understand how drought affects your operation and identifying strategies that would be most appropriate for a particular situation.
Worksheet 2
For ranchers, drought may be defined as too little soil moisture to meet the needs of dominant forage species during their rapid growth windows. Drought and heat can also harm livestock health and gain, water availability, ranch finances, and your stress levels.
Worksheet 3
Having a thorough understanding of the current state of the livestock operation and associated lands is critical to determine where there are strengths, and where improvements in preparation for drought are needed.
Worksheet 4
You can use scenarios to consider the potential threats and opportunities that drought poses to your operation, ranch strengths that you can use to limit drought’s harm, weaknesses that can be addressed to improve your drought readiness, and strategies for preparing for and managing drought.
Worksheet 5
Based on your inventory and thinking through scenarios, what is the overall goal or vision that you have for increasing drought preparedness for your operation?
Part 3
Drought Resilience Plan
Healthy systems are better able to tolerate drought. A drought resilience plan identifies proactive practices to help you build ranch health and flexibly respond to drought. For example:
- Adding flexibility to the operation’s forage/feed resources (e.g., through alternative feeds or alternative grazing lands) can maximize the response options that a rancher has during drought.
- Grazing strategically can increase the vigor and abundance of desirable forage species and improve hydrological condition of the rangeland over time.
- Upgrading or adding stock water tanks can improve grazing distribution and livestock health during drought.
Some drought resilience strategies may take multiple years not only to implement but also to begin providing benefits. While you may not see an immediate benefit from this strategy during a drought, you will see benefits over the long term with these investments.
WorkSheets
Worksheet 6
A resilience plan starts with the gaps or issues you’ve identified through inventorying your operation, considering possible drought scenarios, and setting operational goals and objectives. The strategies you choose to address those gaps or issues should be tailored to your unique set of resources and ranch vision.
Part 4
Drought Contingency Plan
Making decisions (i.e., ”what should I do and when should I do it?”) can be overwhelming when drought has already arrived. A drought contingency plan is intended to help you proactively think through how you can manage during drought to minimize harm. A drought contingency plan outlines actions to take during drought, indicators of drought to monitor, and the optimal time to act.
A drought contingency plan answers the following questions:
- WHAT do I want to protect and foster during drought? (Keeping potential impacts and your objectives in mind.)
- WHO makes the decisions? (Understanding decision-making processes related to public/private lands.)
- WHAT decisions need to be made to achieve the best outcomes for my operation during drought? (Determining contingency actions that best fit the operation.)
- WHEN is the optimal timing for the decision and action? (Setting critical dates and triggers for action.)
- HOW do I know when to implement the plan? (Monitoring drought and resources.)
WorkSheets
Worksheet 7
Use your ranch goals and strategic objectives and scenario exercises to select actions you can take to manage forage and water supply and demand (and animals, finances and personnel) during drought.
Worksheet 8
Setting dates on the calendar when specific conditions warrant action can alleviate some of the stress and guesswork that comes with drought management.
Worksheet 9
Monitoring helps you decide when it is time to act, moving your management approach from reactive to proactive. Work with your planning team to identify the earliest possible indicators of pending forage or water deficits.
Worksheet 10
Complacency in the aftermath of any scale of drought can be hazardous to the long-term health of your operation. Using the planning process to identify priorities and strategies for drought recovery is a great way to avoid this type of complacency.
Part 5
Evaluation – How Did the Plan Work?
Drought planning is cyclical and ongoing. Periodically, you should critically examine your drought plan to determine if the short-term and long-term practices you implemented were successful. Success should be based on the extent to which your drought plan has helped you realize your ranch vision and objectives. Adaptive management is another way of describing this process of monitoring the outcomes of management actions to determine whether those actions are achieving the desired objectives, and adjusting those practices if they are not.
Where appropriate, you should visit with your planning team to share perspectives on how successful planning efforts have been.
Ultimately, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to drought planning. With the resources available to you, you must make decisions that are most appropriate for creating your drought resilient operation.
WorkSheets
Worksheet 11
How did your drought management work for you during recent drought?