#climate-change

Excerpt from this story from Slate:

Every week, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service publishes a dense report of statistics and trends that evaluate the nation’s agricultural sector. The figures—spanning from weekly dairy yields in Texas to cotton production costs in Oklahoma—cue the factors that drive price, supply, and demand for crops and livestock.

The scholarly and (at times) soporific economic reports tend to fly under the radar of academic scrutiny. But the anomalous heat waves and so-called megadroughts of this year’s growing season have rankled the Sun Belt and beckoned for attention toward the records. The numbers now suggest that even the most adapted of livestock are being slaughtered at alarming rates due to extreme exhaustion. As local economies bleed because of it, farmers are jockeying to find solutions.

One of the most important statistics nested in the reports is that of the red meat production in select states and regions, a figure typically recorded in pounds. The relative amount of red meat—which encompasses cattle, sheep, hogs, and lambs—produced by a given region is indicative of the slaughter rate and market interest for the respective sector of livestock. A low cull rate (the frequency at which livestock are exiting a herd due to disease, exhaustion, or an enterprise desire for stronger steers) typically implies that a farm’s operations are stable, with a minimal turnover rate for its livestock population, while a higher rate often suggests that a farm faces internal or external forces that are driving its need to vacate a larger portion of the herd.

Between June 2020 and June 2021, Texas reported that it had slaughtered (or, by association, culled) an additional 38.2 million pounds of red meat livestock, an annual growth of around 30 percent for the figure. The United States as a whole reeled its net production back by 3 percent over that same time period.

What was worse, 36.4 million of those 38.2 million pounds of red meat were produced between May and June—a single summer month accounting for more than 95 percent of its increase in a year. And while official reports for the subsequent months of July and August remain scattered and in assembly, local ranchers I spoke with suggest that the trend has not ebbed to any noticeable degree.

Analysts believe that the problem doesn’t stem from the farms or the livestock, but rather the onerous ripples of the heat. In an email to me, Leann Hunting, the animal industry director at the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, wrote: “The heat and lack of moisture/rainfall leads to a lack of feed and water, which can make it hard to keep the cattle healthy. … Cattle ranchers have been hauling water to areas where natural water sources have been dried up and have been feeding hay to make up for a lack of forage. … Without that water, heat exposure and exhaustion would cause a lot of harm to the cattle.”

The average feeder cattle will find ideal living conditions at around 25 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. At temperatures between 80 and 100 degrees, they begin to undergo rapid exhaustion, and at temperatures above 100, they will die. The average daily high in Phoenix this summer sits at about 105, and the year-over-year rainfall has plummeted from an average 8–12 inches to 4.41 inches, the lowest on record in over 10 years.