When cattle graze shorter pastures, due to drought, their teeth can wear out more quickly.
have any cattle left,” says Ellis. “They started off by culling the weak and nonpro-
ductive cattle, and ended up having to cull some really good cows. Then the next thing you knew, some of them had to depopulate completely to let their pastures rest and keep the grass from being annihilated.” He sees evidence of ranchers rebuilding herds and
holding back heifers, but says, “We probably have about 60 percent of the herd to repopulate, and that’s going to take years, not months.” Ellis points out that replacement females are hard to fi nd and costly in his area of the country. It can also take up to a year for a cow to regain
lost body condition. Part of this is timing, since the spring-calving cows will be trying to rebuild their body condition on summer-stressed forage. In some cases, there has been an unhealthy mix of
toxic weeds in the stunted grass, a situation that can further reduce productivity. Ellis also says shorter grass can result in an increased
risk of parasitism. Then, he says, if deworming leads to the development of drug resistant populations, pastures will become contaminated with resistant worms and lead to the need to adopt long-term strategic deworm- ing programs. Immune suppression caused by drought can lead
to pneumonia and other infections such as IBR and BVD, secondarily affecting the reproductive tract and causing abortions. “We don’t have a lot of pneumonia issues in the Texas Panhandle, but it seems as though in the last year or 2 it defi nitely creeps up in the heat of summer,” Ellis says. “When it’s dusty and 100 degrees for several days
in a row, it’s really tough on those little calves, espe- cially if they’re not getting enough nutrition from the mother due to the lower energy she’s getting [from poor quality forage] because of the drought.”
Survival trumps reproduction Dr. Doug Scholz, director of professional services
102 The Cattleman October 2014
thecattlemanmagazine.com
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