Canadian ranchers range management during drought

Bill Masen - September 16, 2021

The Canadians are trying techniques to improve drought management in the prairie.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-58573877

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Droughts aren’t a new thing and is an issue that ranchers have dealt with for as long as they have been doing it. What did ranchers in the 1800’s or even 1900’s do when there was a drought? I don’t know. And I doubt that many kept diligent records to pass on to others that we could look up and learn about what they did.

My guess is that they just migrated the entire heard to areas where there was water.

 

If you want to learn or relearn about a very trying time for ranchers, farmers, and average citizens look at the American Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. Here’s a good summary of that time period.

For those of you who don’t want to read the article I linked to, I will sum up some of the key points that I gathered from it.

• The Great Depression kicked off from the stock market crash of 1929
• In the 1930’s the dust bowl started because of a severe drought.
• Dirt and dust was picked up by winds, crops failed, families and animals starved and were suffocated from inhaling so much dust
• There was an average of one black-out blizzard of dust that rolled in every two weeks.
• Many children died of dust pneumonia or suffered life long issues.
• The dust bowl lead to the infestation of insects that would eat any of the surviving crops. These grasshoppers were so invasive that they would eat the clothes right off of a farmer’s body, and eat leather and wood equipment.
• There were so many insects that would coat the roads and train tracks that it made it impossible at times for vehicles to get up a hill.
• The jackrabbit population exploded and they couldn’t kill them fast enough, even with a bounty. 
• Millions of animals were just slaughtered and buried in mass graves.