Weather-related issues bring cattle devastation to the Dakotas

Of all the weather-related issues we have to deal with in Louisiana, blizzards are fortunately not one of them.
Sure, we get the occasional ice storm and snowfall, but that is nothing compared to what happened recently in the Dakotas, where some folks got more than four feet of snow in a single afternoon.  The snow has melted away since then, but it left behind thousands upon thousands of dead cattle.
Monty Williams is one of those folks, a rancher near Wall, S.D., who dug a calf out from the snow still alive after more than a week.  It’s a miracle, but it’s also an anomaly among many, many carcasses.
“The first dead cow I got to, I didn’t think it would be that big of deal,” Williams said.  “When I looked up from her, I could see about 10 more.  My heart just sank as I started to look around and I could just see more and more everywhere I looked.  You’re just absolutely helpless and dumfounded at that point.”
Williams estimates he lost more than one-third of his cattle in one fell swoop.  The devastation is not something he is sure his ranch will recover from.
“We’ve had so many problems to begin with,” he said.  “We went through one of the largest droughts in history a year ago.  We had to buy a lot of the feed to get this calf crop on the ground.  We were counting on this crop to pay off the feed that we purchased a year and a half ago and now we don’t have the cows.”
One thing Williams is certain of, after looking in on some of his neighbors, is that many will not recover from this blizzard.
“We’ve all been hit more than once, back-to-back,” Williams said.  “I don’t know how it’s not going to bankrupt a lot of guys.  They will be out of the cow business.  They won’t continue this.”
Someone from Louisiana might think blizzards up there are as common as thunderstorms here, but Val Wagner, a North Dakota rancher says it was earlier and much more intense than anyone could have predicted.
“It was the first week of October,” Wagner said.  “Although snow is always a possibility just about any month, the early snow falls are usually fast, wet and disappear.  It was predicted to snow, but not even the most cynical of weatherman predicted it would hit that fast, that hard and bring with it the winds that were present.  This was unexpected and beyond our realm of control.
For Williams, a man now on seven generations of family land, it’s much more than just a blizzard or an event that will drive the markets higher at a time when the U.S. is trying to rebuild our nations cattle herd.
“This is personal,” Williams said.  “This is very personal at this point.  With the drought we’ve been through, we got rid of all the aged cows trying to reduce numbers to get by as well as we could.  I had no cows left over seven years old.  Those cows I have bought as heifers and have had ever since.  So, you know the cows well, you’ve spent a lot of time with them over the last seven years.  To see that many of them scattered out across the field, it just… I don’t know.  Makes you wonder why you’re doing this.”