When Tres Pinos cattle rancher Allan Renz goes riding into the pasture to check his herd, it’s warmer than usual. Recent rains saturate the earth. There’s grass growing.
“We haven’t seen conditions like this for probably four years,” Renz said. “This year’s kind of an anomaly because it’s this wet, this warm and this early in the year.”
While most in the agricultural industry were glad to see almost four inches of rain hit the county in six days after three consecutive years of drought in the state, cattlemen were among those most affected, as many won’t need to purchase as much feed this year thanks to the precipitation.
“It’s really nothing but good as far as the ag community is concerned,” said Ken Griffin, a biologist with the county agricultural commissioner’s office. “The more rain we get, the more restoration to our groundwater.”
This time last year, many cattle ranchers were feeding hay. They started feeding it just after Thanksgiving and continued through almost Valentine’s Day, said Renz, president of the San Benito County Cattlemen’s Association.
The costs of feeding hay to rangeland cattle can add up fast. Most people Renz knows fed at least $80,000 to $100,000 worth of hay over five months last year, though the exact costs depended on the size of the operation. A single purchase of 25 tons of alfalfa costs about $8,000. Since cattle can eat about 2 percent of their body weight each day, that amount of feed would last about 12 days for 100 animals weighing about 2,000 pounds, Renz said.
“The goal is not to feed,” Renz said. “The goal is to let Mother Nature take care of you.”
It’s not just hay and grass cattle ranchers are thinking about with the recent rains, but also stock dams, which provide water for cattle in remote rangeland. Many stock dams were built in the 1940s and 1950s, Renz said. Permits to build new ones can be tough to secure, he said.
“It’s rather tedious and quite the process,” Renz said. “A lot of ranchers don’t want to deal with the headache. So a lot of ranchers went dry.”
When existing stock dams dried up and the rains did not come to restore them, cattlemen had three choices: Sell their animals, move to new lands or pay to truck in water.
“The only source to fill those dams is rainfall,” Griffin said. “And the last three years with the drought we’ve had almost zero in runoff.”
The dry stock dams are also a reason deer and mountain lions have been moving closer to cities such as Hollister, where there have been big cat sightings near San Benito High School’s agricultural building and Brigantino Park this year. There were also multiple mountain lion sightings at the Stonegate community in Tres Pinos.
“We kind of wonder why all the deer and lions are in town,” Griffin said. “They kind of keep coming closer to water.”
When Renz takes to horseback these days, the fields look like they typically do in March: The soil is saturated, it is in the low 40s at 4:30 a.m. which is unseasonably warm this time of year and things are growing. A good start to the season still doesn’t promise a perfect year, though.
“Anything in agriculture is subject to one, the market; two, the weather,” Renz said. “So you just take it day by day and count your blessings and carry on.”
