Recovering from drought is a challenging period and decision-making during this time requires strategic management decisions to ensure you are in the best position to return to a positive cash flow and profitable operation as quickly as possible.
Key management considerations for beef producers
Recovering from drought is a challenging period and decision-making during this time requires strategic management decisions to ensure you are in the best position to return to a positive cash flow and profitable operation as quickly as possible.
This information has been prepared to help you make informed decisions on how to effectively manage your business following prolonged drought conditions.
It is not a comprehensive analysis of all drought recovery management options, but it does provide a ‘first look’ at some of the key strategies and actions to consider when planning for recovery:
Phase 1: Assessing your feed availability including drought feeding and supplements, assessing pasture availability and quality.
Phase 2: Rebuilding your herd including herd structure and optimum age of turnoff, herd rebuilding strategies, biosecurity considerations.
Phase 3: Monitoring herd and pasture performance including pasture condition and animal performance.
Phase 4: Planning for the next dry.
It is important to remember that management decisions made during drought will impact on the options that are available during drought recovery. The recovery strategies that will be most suitable for you and your business will depend on many factors and it is important that you spend time evaluating which are most applicable and their impacts when planning your drought recovery.
Pastures need time to recover following prolonged drought to remain productive. Grazing systems that include pasture spelling, continued drought feeding and prompt weed management, will help pasture recover in the shortest possible time. Assessing your feed availability is an important first step in drought recovery. Below are some considerations for how to assess pasture quantity and quality and manage both short- and long-term feed availability.
Drought feeding and supplements
- Maintain an adequate plane of nutrition through supplementary feeding while pastures recover. Short-term drought feeding in containment areas may be required.
- For cattle already on hand, consider confining them to holding paddocks and keep drought feeding so they won’t lose weight chasing green pick.
- The most appropriate supplement for your cattle will depend on: the condition of the existing/sourced cattle, the state of available grazing, and your business objectives (survival or production). You will also need to weigh up factors such as cost, availability, labour for feeding out, supplement palatability, ease of controlling intake and availability of equipment. Readers may find the recording of a recent webinar, Drought plans and maintenance feed requirements for cattle, helpful as the presenter discusses all of these concerns.
Assessing pasture availability and quality
- Assessing post-drought pasture availability will help you determine when to restock and/or how long you’ll need to continue drought feeding. It is important to estimate ground cover and standing feed to determine carrying capacity. The FORAGE and VegMachine programs can help you estimate ground cover across your property.
- There are two ways of measuring standing feed; (1) estimate the amount of pasture available using the appropriate photo standard for your pasture type or (2) take pasture cuts. Stocktake workshops delivered by Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) staff are available to support you in developing your own pasture budgets. There are also a series of short ‘How to conduct a forage budget‘ videos on the FutureBeef YouTube channel.
- How well pasture recovers after a drought will depend on the amount and intensity of rain received, the time of year in which the season broke and the physical conditions at the time of rain. Follow up rain is the key to recovery as several rainfall events are required to promote pasture growth and allow seeding and recovery of root reserves. You need to consider the medium to long-term seasonal outlook and the subsequent impact on pasture growth when determining a safe carrying capacity.
- To help facilitate early pasture growth, consider implementing grazing management strategies such as delayed restocking, spelling paddocks and restricting stock to confinement paddocks. It is recommended that you allow at least 6–8 weeks before grazing.
- Stressed and sparse pastures are susceptible to competition from weeds and if left uncontrolled can impact pasture regeneration. Identify weed populations and put strategies in place to manage them early.
- What is the proportion of productive, palatable and perennial (3P) grasses in the paddock? Long-lived and desirable 3P grasses are an indicator of pasture health and productivity. Assessing pasture species composition and survival will help you determine if any damage has been done to your pastures due to drought and the expected recovery potential for each paddock.
- Where you have paddocks with low pasture recovery potential; resowing a permanent pasture and/or planting a forage crop could be considered where land type allows.
Strategy 1: Rebuild the herd slowly from retained progeny
Where a substantial herd reduction has been carried out, allowing herd numbers to rebuild slowly from retained progeny, and taking no other action, is likely to seriously impact the ongoing viability of the business.
Strategy 2: Purchasing PTIC (pregnancy tested in calf) cows to rebuild the herd
Purchasing PTIC cows to rapidly restore the breeder herd at the end of the drought would increase and extend cash flow deficits in the short term and potentially provide a better outcome than just allowing the herd to return to normal numbers through foregoing sales.
Which strategy is best for my business?
The applicability of each of these herd management strategies will be partly dependent on the individual management decisions made during the drought. Determining the most effective recovery option/s for your business will require an analysis of a number of strategies to better define the level of risk and impact on cash flow and profitability. Building each strategy into a cash flow budget for the recovery period allows comparison with the alternative strategies and may allow better communication with lenders.
The Breedcow and Dynama software programs can help you to evaluate the impact of different herd management strategies on the speed of recovery and impact on cash flow and profit. These programs are available for download for free. You can also download the associated representative herd templates. Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries Extension Officers and Economists can help you use these programs.