Drought, fire and high diesel prices 'addin' up tough' for Oregon ranchers

HARNEY COUNTY, ORE. - Late bloomin' rabbitbrush – wads of swaying ochre – stud the roadsides and steep eroded-basalt buttes rising up from the basin floor outside of Hines, Oregon.

In a broad open field, horses munch standing hay as Katie Baltzor watches her black angus cattle on this fall day.

We've ridden out here in a side-by-side vehicle – it's like an overgrown golf cart with a pickup bed in the back made for rough ranch work.

All the animals are quiet. Happy. With their heads down grazing.

"You see that horse, how he's got speckled colors?" said Baltzor with a smile in her voice. "Looks like country gravy, I guess that's why they called him Gravy."

Diesel prices remain near record highs, despite recent actions by President Trump as the mid-term elections get closer.

The high prices are adding to pain for cattle ranchers in western states, who were already struggling with persistent drought. And in Harney County, where bovines outnumber the people – by a lot - there's many mouths to feed.

'Everything has gone up'

"Fuel costs, parts costs, everything has gone up," Baltzor said. "People say that prices have gone up, but calf prices (paid to ranchers) have (too).

"But calf prices still have not kept up with inflation – and so that's what makes it tough for ranchers to keep in business. If everything else goes up and cattle prices don't, you're just spinning your wheels a bit – you better like what you do."

Baltzor's face shows a life spent working in the desert sun. Her long ponytail glints a bit reddish in the afternoon light.

Baltzor and her husband Keith, had just finished riding a bunch of about 150 hundred head of their cattle down Highway 205 on horseback from another pasture.

"Sometimes it is dicey," she said. "There were cars starting to come through our bunch of cows … unfortunately a woman opened up her door and jumped out. And those cows would not go near her. It scared them, they wanted to come back anyway. Then she got out again and still was stopped. People just don't understand, they don't know. When you see a herd of cows and they're coming towards you, don't stop, just keep coming through them."

Baltzor was moving the cattle so they could work them closer to home. They are going preg-check the mother cows to make sure they're carrying new babies, and give all the cattle and calves vaccinations and dewormer.

Wildfires brought them home

But for Baltzor, this year is already addin' up tough. The places where Baltzor typically ranges her cattle in the mountains were ravaged by record-size wildfires this summer, robbing them of the grass the herds usually eat. Baltzor, and hired riders, had to hoof it through heavy smoke into the mountains to extract their cattle from the path of the fires.

"So all our cows, instead of coming home the second week of September, we had to bring them home the third week in July," Baltzor said. "Other folks had to do the same. And some people had to start feeding – we didn't, we had the rakebrunch."

Rakebunching means just raking pasture hay into piles, and leaving it in the field for animals.

Now, it's gonna take time 'til the mountain grass comes back. In some areas where her neighbors' ground has been burned over, it's taken years for them to be able to return their animals to graze, Baltzor said.

"Where are we gonna run cows?" she said. "Some of those fields that burned, the allotments you can't go back on them for a couple of years. And because so many acres burned in Harney County, it's not just my husband and myself that have this issue."

With no grass, ranchers need hay to feed their cattle. But the drought that set the stage for the fires has dried up Baltzor's hay meadows, too.

"So, the meadows were very short," Baltzor said. "Some of them got some water and you were able to cut a little bit. Some of them didn't even get water and you couldn't even cut some of the fields."

Rakebunch

Here's where the high diesel prices add up tough – what little hay there is, is a lot more expensive to harvest.

"The tractors, you know everything is diesel, and it's expensive and it costs a lot to keep them running," she said.

Haying typically takes several passes with a tractor – you have to cut it, turn the windrows to sun dry, and then bale them and stack them. Each time they fill the tractor with diesel now, it's about $300.

"And so just like this year when we were trying to decide, 'Should we try to run and bale some of this hay? Or it's not very good, it's very light, should we just rakebunch it?" she said. "Part of that was looking at the cost of diesel."

Rakebunching means going over it fewer times with the tractor. They also rakebunched because they feared more wildfire would force them back to their homeplace with the drought. Rakebunching is a good solution for the late summer and fall, but it will leave them short of hay later.

"But the bigger problem becomes next year," Baltzor said. "If we don't get the precipitation, then we don't have the irrigation water and then we'd be looking at purchasing hay."

Purchasing hay can mean driving long distances to get it, or having it delivered, in big trucks that burn a lot of diesel.

Baltzor drives her side-by-side through grass the color of a flaxen palomino.

'You keep a heifer'

This year's high diesel prices come at a time when the price of beef in the supermarket is also way up. Ranchers can sell their calves now for pretty good money. But, "It's not something you just do," Baltzor said. "You keep a heifer."

Heifers are young females, ranchers like to keep some or all of the ones born every year, so they can produce more calves, and replace cows that are too old for that. It's a longer term investment.

"It's two years [for a heifer to be bred and] before you have a calf," she said. "You know, a product. It's not that they're going to have a calf right away. And sometimes people don't understand that."

Break point and winter

Baltzor said she and her husband and ranch partner have switched to gas pickups to try to save a little on diesel. But she said every ranch here has a different break point

"Do you have vehicle loans?" Baltzor said. "Do you have cow loans? Do you have land loans?"

Baltzor said she and her husband worked outside jobs for years to be able to build their herd and accumulate land.

"It will pencil for us," Baltzor said. "Because we're lucky we worked really hard not to have debt. But not everyone's that lucky. And when we first started out we had a lot of debt …. Nobody gave it to us. We had to find places to rent, and we had to buy cattle. And we had to take out loans to do all of that."

On the way out of the pasture, a metal gate squawks a lot as it's closed and then clanks shut, held fast by a rope.

"There's different ways to get into the cattle business, and ours wasn't the easiest way," Baltzor said. "But I think it's very worthwhile. Because you appreciate what you have."

But times are lean for many in southeast Oregon, and now – here comes winter.