What's this Weather Gonna Do?!

For the 13th time in February 2020, I awoke this morning and checked several weather apps on my phone. And as in the 12 days previous to this morning, I found myself disappointed and worried about the lack of precipitation in our forecast. We're nearly halfway through what is typically one of our wetter months in the Sierra foothills, and we have yet to measure any rain. Being obsessed with weather records, I've looked back at my data from previous Februaries here in Auburn and found that 10 times since 2002, we've received less than average rain during the month (including a measly 0.55 inches in 2013, during the depth of our 1000-year drought). But we've never received nothing.

Social media, I suppose, is the modern rancher's coffee shop or general store. Facebook and Twitter seem to be the places that we share news, compare ranching conditions, and commiserate with one another. Earlier this week, a reporter from the Sacramento Bee tweeted this:

To which I replied, "Even without your permission, I started getting nervous in October. Precip is short; grass is shorter."

This morning, I tweeted this:

This generated quite a bit of discussion about anxiety and memories of the last drought. Chris Sayers, a farming friend who I only know through the wonders of social media, responded:

"The psychological let down after Nov-Dec rainfall has been acute for me. Warm, dry, windy weather is as tough on my mental state as it is on the trees."

Later, I took a call from another friend who ranches here in the foothills. He confided that he was worried, though pleasantly surprised by the amount of grass and soil moisture at one of the ranches he leases. He admitted, however, that he would be weaning his bull calves early of we hadn't received any significant rain by the end of the month.

Having raised sheep and managed cattle through the 2012-2015 drought, I feel like I am better equipped to deal with the return of dry conditions this time around, at least from a management perspective. I've already gone through the pain of selling off sheep. My sheep partner Roger Ingram and I keep careful track of forage conditions. When we started getting worried about forage quantity last fall, we took advantage of some alfalfa stubble that our friend Nathan Medlar had contracted to graze. We talk regularly about whether we need to sell sheep to reduce our forage demand or save feed for next fall. We have the portable fencing systems and stock water equipment necessary to move our sheep to where there is forage.

But I also realized during the virtual coffee shop conversations I had on Facebook and Twitter today that I'm tired. The anxiety of dealing with one weather-related crises after another (from wildfire to public safety power shutoffs to impending drought) is exhausting. I'm not sure I know what a normal year is, exactly, but I'd sure like to experience two or three of them in a row! In some ways, I guess, our advanced technology and forecasting abilities can heighten my anxiety - without my smartphone, I probably wouldn't know that we aren't likely to get any rain for the next two weeks!

In the meantime, I joke that the rain will return on the day we start to lamb (around February 22 this year). Dark humor, I suspect, has always been part of the coping mechanism for folks whose livelihoods are tied directly to Mother Nature's whims. I still hold out hope that we'll have another "Miracle March" - or even a wet April and May like 2019 (when we received more than 7 inches of rain). There's no telling what this weather is gonna do....