Surviving the Drought

Dear Friend,

These last few months have been dry—too dry. While the rain we did receive recently in parts of North Missouri was welcome, although not with the accompanying storms, it certainly wasn’t enough. The corn crop is withering away in the fields, pastures are picked clean, and farmers are already scrambling to find hay to feed their herds.

The problem is, there isn’t much hay out there. The lack of rain has hit hay crops hard too. If you can navigate the scams and find hay for sale, it’s already going for well over $100 a bale in many places. Farmers will face an impossible set of choices: sell off part of the herd, go bankrupt trying to feed them, or let them starve. That isn’t much of a choice at all.

If you don’t grow corn or raise cattle, you might be wondering—what’s this got to do with me? Our economy in North Missouri, our state, and the Midwest is built from the ground up off the backs of farmers and ranchers. A tough year on the farm doesn’t just mean a tough year for farmers—it means a tough year for everyone, certainly our friends and neighbors.

Up to this point, farmers have pretty much used every square inch of land they can to feed their livestock. Though the only real fix is more rain, there is an option for haying and grazing that would ease the pain. There are millions of acres enrolled in the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Conservation Reserve Program, which sets aside farmland for conservation. That’s additional land that could be used temporarily for haying and grazing, yet it remains untapped for the most part.

Some of that land has already been opened to emergency grazing, but only in places where the drought is the worst. If the rest of that land in Missouri isn’t made available right away, there’s a pretty good chance it won’t be usable by the time USDA gets around to making it available.

That’s why I led several of my Missouri Congressional colleagues in sending a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack asking him to explore all available options to immediately open up CRP in Missouri to emergency haying. It’s just common sense to use what we’ve got to avert further disaster. I hope Secretary Vilsack will take a close look at this so our farmers and ranchers in Missouri—our friends and neighbors—can survive this drought and continue feeding the world.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves