UPDATED Image-Drought Leaves Dark Cloud Over California Ranchers, Growers
Soon I’ll get up hill with my cameras again and see from up close how this plays out. We have a lot of forest still early in it’s recovery from the “Station” fire of a few years ago.
By David Pierson
February 4, 2014, 5:30 p.m.
CLOVIS, CALIF. — Beneath unyielding blue skies on a recent afternoon, Ryan Indart knelt down to examine what was left of one of his sheep pastures.
Land that should have been lush with native grasses this time of year has been reduced to powdery dirt, splotched with a few withered strands of filaree and foxtail. And where there’s no vegetation, there are no sheep.
A fourth-generation rancher, Indart has already sent 10% of his 4,000 ewes — which he normally would want to keep — to the slaughterhouse because he can’t afford the hay to feed them. If the drought keeps up, his hungry ewes won’t reproduce as they should to make his investment pay off. Yearlings will struggle to gain weight because their mothers won’t produce enough milk. Indart may have to cull more of them if the clouds don’t open up.
“These animals need to be on green pasture,” he said. “Without Mother Nature giving us rain, we can’t do that. We can’t survive just feeding them hay. It’s critical.”
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UPDATE
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released that photo to illustrate what a year of drought conditions (which have intensified recently) have wrought on the landscape. The amount of snow in California’s Sierra region is between 4 percent and 22 percent of normal. And a change that drastic is easily seen from space.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/the-california-drought-as-seen-from-space-20140204