Airlift Feeds Snowbound Cattle

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
January 5, 2007
In an attempt to head off disaster, ranchers and military personnel scrambled to feed snowbound cattle weakened by two consecutive blizzards.
By Chase Squires, Associated Press
LAMAR, Colo. - Hundreds of hay bales fell from the sky across Colorado's rangeland as military helicopter and cargo plane crews delivered food to cattle that have been stranded by heavy snow and high drifts for a week.
Ranchers in smaller helicopters landed near frozen streams and used sledgehammers to chop ice from the water for the livestock to drink. And on the ground Thursday, National Guard troops made more hay deliveries by truck.
Starvation risk
The situation on the snowbound plains is getting dire. Typically, cattle can survive only five to 10 days without food or water in good conditions, state veterinarian John Maulsby said. For the cattle in eastern Colorado and on the Kansas and Nebraska plains, it has now been seven days since a blizzard dumped up to three feet of snow and whipped up 10-foot-high drifts.
''We think there are probably 30,000 head [of cattle] out there that are at risk that we're having to make sure we feed,'' said Maj. Gen. Mason Whitney of the Colorado Guard.
There is no estimate of how many have died.
Back-to-back storms
Cattle were already spread thinly across the region before the storm hit because a prolonged drought had left little grass for them to eat. The back-to-back holiday blizzards have since covered fences dividing pastures so the animals have scattered even more.
One Lamar-area rancher could find only half of his 600-head herd, said Don Ament, the Colorado agriculture commissioner. Ament said farmers and ranchers have told him it's worse than the 1997 blizzard that killed 30,000 cattle and cost $28 million in agriculture losses.
One Kansas feedlot owner said he had lost 450 cattle out of the 155,000 he has on feed preparing for slaughter and 20 dairy cows out of his herd of 7,500. Still, Roy Brown, co-owner of Cattle Empire near Satanta, said his insurance would cover his losses, which he estimated at about $350,000.
The 20,000 bison on ranches in southeastern Colorado, western Kansas and Oklahoma were unaffected by the storm, partly because bison use their head and hump ''like a big snowplow to get down to where the forage is,'' said Dave Carter, executive director of the National Bison Association.
While the pilots dropped more than 900 heavy hay bales, trying to get close enough to the animals to make the food easily reachable but not so close to scare them, rangers on trucks and snowmobiles hauled more hay to cattle closer to the growing number of county roads that have been cleared of snow.
 
Back
Top