Anxious Days

My family will probably tell you - this weather makes me grumpy. What may seem like "nice" weather to most (75F during the day, low to mid 40s at night, and not a drop of rain) makes me nervous in November. And so I'm grumpy - and anxious.

I start each day by looking at the weather app on my phone. Since the third week of October, the 10-day forecast has been largely the same when it comes to precipitation. No rain forecast for 8 or 9 days; a 10% chance of rain on day 10 - seems like rain is always just over the horizon. I suspect the forecast models have to put rain in the 10-day forecast because it's SUPPOSED to be raining now. But it isn't. I made the mistake today of looking at the 3-month precipitation outlook from the National Weather Service - we have a 40% chance of being drying than normal through the end of January. Not good news.

We typically manage our grazing with an nod toward the possibility of drought - we try to save dry forage for the late autumn months, knowing we may not get much grass growth before the short, cold days of winter send our annual grasses into dormancy. We try to keep our sheep numbers in balance with our feed availability. This year is no different; we'll ship the sheep back to winter pasture in about 10 days - and we've got 60 days of dry forage saved for them. But this year, 60 days might not be enough.

In a "normal" year (whatever that is), these hillsides would be green by Thanksgiving.
They won't be this year, I'm afraid.

We're quickly approaching the point where rain won't help us in the short term, and even in the mid-term. Even in an unusually warm fall/winter, we'll reach a point around the winter solstice when the days are too short - and the soil temperature too cold - to grow any grass. And since the early germinated grass I bragged about in September has mostly died, we'll need another germinating rain to get the grass growing again. Unless we get rain in the next 2-3 weeks, we'll have to wait until 2020 to see much green. And even if it rains by Thanksgiving, we'll have to wait 60-75 days before this new grass is tall enough to fill our sheep.

As I've written during other dry autumns, we time our production system to take advantage of the grass that Mother Nature usually grows. We have the rams in with the ewes now - breeding season will last until November 16. The early gestation ewes have fairly low nutritional requirements - our dry forage will mostly satisfy their demands. But as they approach late gestation (in January) and then lactation (beginning in late February), they'll need the highest quality feed we can provide - lots of green grass! If we're below average in precipitation over the next three months, lambing season could be difficult. Our options are to sell sheep or buy hay - and neither one makes me happy.

I've done this long enough to know that my worrying won't make it rain. No matter how many different weather apps I consult during the course of the day, the models don't lie. We don't have any rain in our short-term future; we may not have much rain in our longer-term future. While the objective part of my brain understands this, the emotional part of my brain is grumpy. I wish it would rain.