Winter Pasture, South Wallowas . . . Feeding supplemental hay.

According to one rancher I met in Halfway, Oregon, during the winter months
he reckons he uses about 11 kilos (24 pounds) of supplemental hay per cow
per day. The animals are kept outside year-round. The snow cover comes
and goes, and minimum temperatures vary from right around 0 c. to as cold as
-35 c. (-37 F.). Hardy animals, indeed!

The two key limiting factors ranches on former shrub-steppe country
must deal with are: First, the availability of irrigation water derived almost
entirely from the mountain winter snowpack. Ranchers watch the depth
of snow in the highcountry, what they convert to Snow Water Equivalent,
as closely and with as much anxiety as investors watch the stock market.
Second, is what I would call the energy balance with regards to hay. This
is something I've watched with great interest in my years in the Alps on
mountain farms. How much hay does one need to import to sustain a given
number of animals. This year, the same rancher sited above said he brought in
about 45% of his hay. (They had a bad winter for snow, which translates as
a very much diminished hay harvest.) As you can see, farming can quickly
become a complicated and risky business. In my view, this is where strong
traditions play an absolutely vital and essential role. It is much more difficult
to say how many animals a hectare of land will sustain than a single generation
of farmers will ever be able to figure out. And hay? Well—and that's my
Swiss alpine conditioning speaking where hay is made still largely by hand
and with great care—making hay is an art, much like making herbal tea. As
soon as hay is imported, which they do now in the Alps as well, then the whole
problem of invasive species is amplified by some unknown factor. Is it 10 times,
a 100 times worse, or more? Nobody I've encountered seems to know. With the
foreign hay come seeds of every description, good and bad, one supposes. My
guess is that it would take two or three hundreds years of solid agricultural
tradition to figure that one out.

On the road in the Northwest of America.

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