Farmers Race to Save Their Cattle From Canada’s Drought

The wind usually blows through the fields and rustles the grains that stretch for miles toward the horizon of this flat ranchland in Western Canada. But for the past few weeks, the heat in parts of Manitoba has been stifling and there have been few gusts of air.

Thick gray smoke from distant forest fires hovers over the pastures, some browned or barren because of a yearslong drought that has worsened since Western Canada’s record-breaking June heat wave.

A blurry haze settled over dozens of cows grazing on scattered green patches near the rural Manitoba town of Fisher Branch in July. Throughout the region, field after field of the pastures and crops that keep the cattle fed was stunted, parched or being mowed down by an infestation of grasshoppers, and farmers were running out of alternatives for food. Many rural municipalities in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta had declared an agricultural emergency.

Cattle in a pen at an auction yard.

Across parts of Manitoba, farming families are contemplating what was once unthinkable: selling some or all of the herds that it took many generations to breed. This year’s drought could spell the end for those whom raising cattle is an income, tradition and way of life.

“We can’t starve these animals,” said Michael Duguid, of the cows on his farm near the town of Arnes. “They have the right to eat and drink water just like us, and the humane thing to do is let them go.”

Canada ranks among the top 10 beef exporting countries in the world as of last year, according to Canada Beef, a national marketing organization. Manitoba has the third largest beef cow population — the cows that produce calves — and almost all of its operations are cow-calf farms, starting points in the country’s beef trade.

Cows give birth to one calf per year, usually between January and June, at which time the mother-baby pairs are hauled out to pastures to graze from the spring until the end of October — timelines that vary based on the weather and vegetation growth.

The calves are weaned, sold in the fall, fattened, then slaughtered, while the farmers store their harvested crops and bales of hay as supplemental feed for mother cows in the winter months.

Researchers say the dryer seasons began around 2018 and have broken records. Last year was the driest ever recorded in Manitoba’s capital of Winnipeg, about 100 miles south of the heavily agricultural Interlake region, said Natalie Hasell, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, a federal agency.

In the Interlake region, where Fisher Branch is, precipitation has been less than 40 percent of its average in the last three months as of July 19, according to drought data by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a federal agency.

“Right now, they’re pretty well all running out of grass,” said Tim McAllister, a research scientist who specializes in beef production at the agriculture agency.

The country’s scorching temperatures, and its “heat dome” — hot air trapped under high-pressure atmospheric conditions — would not have been possible without the influence of human-caused climate change, according to a team of researchers.

Manitoba’s cattle farmers support efforts to reduce climate change, said Tyler Fulton, president of the Manitoba Beef Producers, but now they are just trying to survive this crisis.

Kevin Stocki, his pastures already brown and dormant, tapped into his reserve feed supply about four months early to keep the 80 cows on his family farm in Fisher Branch fed.

“Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed because you know what’s coming already,” Mr. Stocki said. “It just turns your stomach.”

“I’m third generation,” he said. “We’ve put over 70 years into this and to just get rid of it, it doesn’t come back.”

He has sold some cows earlier than he otherwise would have, but will hold onto the rest as long as he can.

A grain-and-cattle farm in Arborg, on the other hand, is selling off all but two dozen animals in its 250 cow herd, the farmer, Stuart Melnychuk, said. The farm has been in his family since 1909.

Mr. Melnychuk has been using some of his grain harvest, which would otherwise be sold, to help feed the cows over the last few years of dry temperatures. “It’s not that you can go to the neighbor and buy feed for these cows,” Mr. Melnychuk said. “There’s no feed to be found here,” he said, adding, “It gets to the point that you can’t get yourself out of a hole you’re going to be digging.”

Mr. Melnychuk believes he is one of few who have sold their animals to farmers in other provinces — his are headed to a farm in Ontario — rather than sent straight to a butcher.

“We’ve seen lots of cows hitting the meat market that normally would be in farmers’ fields grazing, and farmers having to make tough decisions,” said Kirk Kiesman, general manager at the Ashern Auction Mart, a livestock auction house in the region. “No one wants to see their genetic potential being turned into meat.”

Harsh supply-and-demand economics mean that farmers who opt to sell their animals — whether to a butcher or to another farmer — are facing a market flush with cows, and therefore, lower prices, said Reynold Bergen, science director at the Beef Cattle Research Council.

Farming is not the most lucrative field to begin with. General farm workers in the Interlake can earn up to 50,000 Canadian dollars a year, according to government wage data, with over 40 percent of Canadian farmers supplementing their incomes with off-farm work.

“Producers are going to be selling these cattle for bargain basement prices, and they’re going to lose all the equity they’ve spent lifetimes or generations building up,” said Joe Bouchard, who runs a 400-head cow-calf operation in Fisher Branch. “This has been by far the toughest year we’ve ever had to face.”

The alternative to selling the cows is equally problematic: keeping them and bracing for skyrocketing feed prices, if they are able to secure any.

A cattle sale in July, when the cows and their calves should be grazing on pastures, is unprecedented, said Ashern’s longest-tenured auctioneer of close to four decades, Buddy Bergner. He has visited nearly every ranch within 150 miles of the town over the years, he said, and is now a listening ear for some of the farmers confronted with this decision.

“When you see grown men and grown women sitting there crying, it’s pretty hard,” he said.

Marie-Claude Bibeau, the minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, toured some of the drought-stricken farms in late July while in Manitoba to announce relief measures, including a livestock tax deferral, and touted a disaster benefit that offsets certain costs incurred because of the hay shortage.

Douglas Cattani, a forage researcher and professor at the University of Manitoba said cattle farmers would need a few inches of rain every week or two leading up to the winter to help this year’s harvest.

But Ms. Hasell, the meteorologist, said she does not see that in the cards based on August’s forecast of above-average temperatures and no clear trend of precipitation.

With another emergency auction date approaching, Mr. Duguid, whose granddaughter may carry on as the fourth generation in his family’s farming tradition, is planning to sell 50 of his 300 cows this week, and then another 50 at the next sale.

“I wish someone would take them because they’re good, quiet animals,” Mr. Duguid said. “You don’t want to see your animals go to slaughter before that’s their purpose.”