When making a good decision, an appropriate decision period must be established and the decision should implement your objectives (Parsons, 2021). Additionally, you must create alternatives and evaluate those alternatives using tradeoffs using sound reasoning based on your objectives and the resources you have available. Order matters: when making a proactive decision, it is important that create a clear set of objectives first, then evaluate the alternatives to reach these objectives. Finally, it is important that we commit to our decision and implement the plan.

When deciding to lease pasture ground, consider drought when creating the lease (Jansen, 2020). To implement drought in the lease, be explicit about the impacts of precipitation on forage to avoid overgrazing yet assuring that we don’t short our cattle on feed. The landlord and the lessee should agree on how much of the forage can be grazed and how cattle will be moved out. Additionally, a mutual solution to adjust the rental rate if cattle are moved out early should be established in the lease. With clear communication, considering drought in the lease can reduce stress on both the landlord and the lessee.

Federal assistance insurance is available to help mitigate the risk and loses caused by a drought. Pasture Range and Forage (PRF) is federally subsidized grazing land insurance based on rainfall (Jansen, 2020). The deadline for this is usually around November, so producers should reach a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) agent beforehand. Farm Service Agency (FSA) provides financial assistance through livestock forage disasters program for producers who lease or own grazing land and are affected by drought over a period of time. However, there are compliances one must follow to be eligible. Therefore, it is important that before a grazing lease is finalized, is take it to an FSA agent for review and assurance that the drought plan in the lease follows their disaster program requirements (Beckman and Jansen, 2020).

There are several options to manage drought effects, but not all are realistic for all operations. Therefore, a producer must decide how to manage their herd during a drought based on their objectives and resources. During drought, producers may cull underperforming cows, older cows, or cows with issues such as temperament or broken mouths (Arterburn, 2017). Additionally, producers may opt to do earlier pregnancy checks and sell open cows to free up grass for bred cows. Another practice includes early weaning of calves and taking them to a dry lot (Rasby and McGee, 2011). This allows our cows to be maintained by grazing poor quality pastures or fed low quality feed because a dry cow will require less nutrients than a lactating cow. During a drought, it is important that we calculate the amount of feed we will need, secure additional feed sources ahead of time, and compare different solutions.

Preparing for a drought is important as it puts us one step ahead in mitigating risk by ensuring that we have enough feed and forage for our herd without overgrazing and deteriorating our pastures.