Insight: The great northern migration — of U.S. cattle
CHICAGO |
CHICAGO (Reuters) – For more than a century, through a dozen dry spells when lakes disappeared and the land died, thousands of cows from the Swenson Land Cattle Co have roamed the fields of Texas.
Yet the drought currently ravaging the southern Plains has done what the Dust Bowl could not: chased them off this land and driven them more than 600 miles north to Nebraska.
Now, as the worst drought in a century stretches into its second year, these ranchers and many of their peers are herding their animals in record numbers to the Cornhusker State and other points north, in search of grazing land that is not parched – a shift that is fueling a dramatic economic and cultural reshaping of the U.S. livestock industry.
“If we’re going to survive, we have to go north,” says Dennis Braden, general manager of Swenson Land Cattle Co in Stamford, Texas, about 170 miles west of Dallas. “We have to go.”
While some Texas ranchers hang on, selling off their stock at an unprecedented pace that has reduced America’s cattle herd to the smallest in 60 years, many are carving new homesteads out of some of the richest grassland in North America, a bid for survival that falls somewhere between surrender and hope.
In cattle-car convoys that wind along routes cowboys used in the 1800s, this migration is also a stark illustration of the myriad threats facing the world’s future food supply: intense competition for land; increasing demands on limited water resources; and the growing threat of volatile weather.
The size and speed of the shrinkage in the U.S. cattle herd has left the industry reeling. As the national cattle and calf inventory fell 2 percent from a year ago to its smallest since 1952, the herd in Texas dropped 11 percent or 1.4 million head, the biggest decline in nearly 150 years of recorded data.
But Nebraska’s herd increased 4 percent or 250,000 head in the year to January 1, the most of any state, placing it ahead of Kansas as the country’s second-largest cattle producer, according to the Department of Agriculture’s bi-annual survey released on Friday.
Today, 7.1 percent of the country’s cattle is in Nebraska – the state’s largest share of the national herd since the federal government began collecting data in 1867. At 13 percent, Texas now has the smallest
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