MEDICINE HAT, Alta. – The only colours on a morning drive down the Trans-Canada Highway from Calgary to Medicine Hat are the red streaks across the sky from a magnificent prairie sunrise.
The earthen tones are a bleak gray with a few ragged weeds in the ditches providing the only relief.
This is the picture this fall in southern Alberta, which has been hit by the worst drought in a century. It has forced cows out of pastures early and sent lighter-than-normal calves to market.
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“It’s so dry even the gophers have pulled up stakes and moved,” joked Delvin Stuber as he prepared for a presort feeder sale at the Medicine Hat Feeding Company.
It is late September and they have 4,300 head on offer. It is a month earlier than normal for this kind of sale.
Pen after pen of calves weighing less than 350 pounds crowd into the ring. Taken from their mothers the day before, the baby-faced calves are bawling and confused.
“You have to sell the little ones because there’s no feed so they won’t grow,” said Wallis Winter of Burstall, Sask.
He normally sells his calves in mid-November but lack of feed and water forced him to join this year’s early feeder run.
He moved his cows 650 kilometres away to pasture. The pasture cost him between 63 and 80 cents per cow-calf unit per day.
He has just heard he may have to find alternative arrangements for next year. He does not want to sell his cows.
“If you lose the factory, how will you get back into the business?”
Calf prices are still relatively strong in this year’s feeder run that started six weeks early. It’s a Pyrrhic victory for people like Winter.
“Any extra revenue we would have made has been taken up in trucking and feed.”
Feed and water don’t exist in the area. There will be no swath grazing over the winter because dryland cereal crops were so sparse there was nothing worth harvesting. There is no stockpiled forage.
Don Heller, who works at the Medicine Hat yard, said they have also seen more cows and bulls coming to market. Last year, many older cows were retained.
“People were holding cows because the calf prices were so high,” he said before the sale.
“Now they are getting tougher. There’s more dry cows and some young cows may go on feed.”
Surprisingly, the calves being sold are in good health and few thin animals have been seen, even though some producers have been hauling feed and water for a year. Some actually tapped into the Medicine Hat water supply.
“It’s a full-time job hauling water,” Heller said. “It’s been a costly summer for a lot of people.”
The story is the same across the western Prairies.
At Stavely’s Foothills Auction, Frank McInenly said their annual feeder run started Aug. 1 when normally it would not become hectic until the first part of October. The calves are coming in between 300 and 700 lb. because their owners are out of grass and water.
“The calves look pretty good considering the grass condition,” he said.
His auction is drawing calves from dried-out areas of interior British Columbia, and from an area in Alberta south of Calgary and west to Lomond. The prices are also holding strong in relation to a weaker fat market.
At Heartland Livestock in Swift Current, Sask., the calves are coming earlier to fully booked sales.
Lee Crowley said the greater concern is the fate of the Saskatchewan cow herd with no feed or water this winter.
“Twenty-five percent of the cows are going to be canned,” he said.
“We’ve been canning cows since May.”
Those that haven’t been culled for slaughter have been shipped to Manitoba. He suspects many will not return to Saskatchewan.
John Popp of Manitoba Agriculture said many of the cows were moved into southwestern Manitoba. The wintering rate is between $1.50 and $1.80 per day and there is enough pasture to hold them until next month before winter feeding starts.
With the continued drought in Alberta, pasture recovery is expected to be slow and no one will attempt to graze dried-out grassland.
“Some of the cows may stay here until next fall. Some may just stay here,” Popp said.
Rick Wright at Heartland Livestock in Brandon said their feeder run started in September as producers wanted to capture better money for calves.
“Prices were so good guys decided to wean early and sell early.”
He has seen cows in his area from as far west as Taber, Alta. The calves were weaned and sold in Manitoba.
“We were the Garden of Eden here compared to Alberta and Saskatchewan,” he said.
In addition, hay sales are brisk.
“With the hog trucks going to Maple Leaf (in Brandon) and the hay trucks going to Alberta, you can hardly get a spot on the road.”
