5 Effective Strategies for Livestock Farmers This Dry Season

For Livestock farmers, the dry season can be the most challenging time. This is not just because of the dust in the air or the heat every other person feels during this season, but because of how it affects or even threatens the lives of their stocks.

During the dry season, animals experience physical and nutritional stress due to the scarcity of feed and water, which further affects their health and productivity. Climate change has further worsened the impact of the season on farmers and their animals.

In northern Nigeria and other parts of Africa, where dry spells can last from two to nine months, resulting in a total absence of rainfall, farmers who have no other means can experience severe economic shocks.

While we cannot control the climate, livestock farmers have come to learn that to weather the struggles of the dry season, proactive preparation, informed decision-making, and timely action are key.

In this article, we will explore how the dry season affects livestock farming, how livestock farmers can prepare for the season, manage the health of their stocks and the survival of their business.

How the Dry Season Impacts Livestock Farming

The arrival of the dry season typically signals the start of the lean season, affecting both the animals and the farm's economic stability.

Nutritional stress from reduced feed quantity and quality: A primary challenge is the nutritional stress that results from a severe decrease in the availability of fresh food and water. Natural pastures, including grasses and other sources of leafy material, are their main feed source. However, as the wet season fades and the dry season sets in, their nutritive value rapidly declines, often leading to grasses that are fibrous and low in crude protein. 

The reduced quantity of forage causes animals to spend more time grazing, often 10 to 12 hours per day, compared to the normal 7 to 8 hours per day during the wet season. While this is a coping strategy, it is eventually inefficient because the low quality of the forage also means they expend more energy to get even less nutrition.

Water Scarcity: Low rainfall can lead to a drop in the availability of drinking water, which, combined with the dry, hot climate, forces animals to walk increased distances to find grazing and water sources. Failure to provide sufficient water reduces performance more rapidly and severely than any other nutrient deficiency.

Reduced Productivity and Health: Due to the decline in quality and quantity of feed and water intake, several physiological processes are affected, which impacts the animal’s ability to fight diseases and maintain healthy conditions. Malnourished animals are weakened, compromising their immune systems and increasing their susceptibility to diseases, morbidity, and mortality.

The dust in the environment and the heat stress from increased exposure to high temperatures can lead to threatening illnesses. Nutritional diseases, internal/external parasites, and general diseases such as Pulpy Kidney are commonly observed during this period.

Animals also suffer from weight loss due to insufficient nutrients, which then leads to leanness and poor body condition. Milk output also falls and sometimes stops completely.

This general unfavourable condition will affect the productivity of the animals, whether for meat, milk or even offspring.

Reproductive Decline: Nutritional status is strongly linked to fertility. It is usually challenging for animals to carry a pregnancy to term and nurture young ones during the dry season due to the nutritional and climate stress. The situation worsens with drought incidents and the year after, because the difficulty of conceiving and carrying a pregnancy to term during drought means livestock farms have fewer calves in the following year. Young calves born also have a slimmer chance of survival in stretched dry seasons.

How Does Dry Season Affect Livestock Farmers

The effect of the dry season doesn’t end on animals alone; it gets to the farmers too, because beyond the increased stress of sourcing for food and ensuring healthy conditions for stocks, the economic performance of farms also reduces.

As ranch owners worry about the increasing cost of managing their farms, dry seasons bring acute economic and social stress for pastoral communities. The drought-induced decline in milk supply prompts pastoral households to increase their grain purchase for food. This increased demand for grains coincides with a rapid escalation of cereal prices (as crop production is also affected) and a fall in pastoralists' purchasing power.

To cope with extreme drought situations, which are becoming common in Africa, farmers often have to sell more of their livestock, sometimes at extremely low prices, to help the situation, especially when animals are dying. Initially, non-essential animals (male calves, elderly females) are sold, but if the drought intensifies, herders are forced to liquidate breeding females, representing herd capital crucial for future growth. This distressed sale often causes the value of livestock to drop sharply, partly because the animals are usually not in good condition or have a great weight.

How Livestock Farmers Can Prepare for Dry Season

Effective dry season preparation requires proactive planning that addresses feed security, land management, and resource assessment.

1. Planning and Setting Trigger Points

1. Planning ahead of the dry season is paramount. Livestock producers must develop a drought management plan tailored to their farm conditions. Key steps involve assessing current resources, including water, feed, and infrastructure, and listing decision options.
2. Farmers need to identify critical thresholds or trigger points. These are pre-defined signals that prompt a decision and remove emotion from stressful periods.

For example, knowing that when pasture cover falls below a specific level (such as 800 kg DM/ha) or dam capacity drops below a set percentage by a certain date requires a corrective decision.  Early action based on these triggers is always better than a late reaction. Farmers should also prioritise core breeders to protect long-term genetic investment.

2. Pasture Management

Pasture management should aim to maximise forage production throughout the season. Some key strategies include:

• Rotational Grazing and Resting: Promoting the introduction of rotational grazing in communal areas is highly recommended. Rotational grazing allows the sward a necessary rest for regrowth, improving vigour and species composition, and providing better feed supply throughout the year. Specific paddocks can be rested during the wet season to serve as "bush foggage" grazing during the early dry season.
• Timing cultivation and planting drought-tolerant forage: Farmers who cultivate crops to provide feed for their livestock need to be strategic in their choice of crop and planting time. They should prioritise pasture crops that are drought-resistant, easy to grow and contain the required nutrition. They also need to utilise the opportunity of the last rain episode to prepare the land. Waiting until the land is dry makes cultivation difficult and expensive, and production will be too late to meet peak dry season pricing.
• Fodder Conservation: Harvesting and storing feed during the wet season is the most effective way to prepare for dry-season feed security. Green biomass, harvested when highly nutritious during the rainy season, can be dried and stored as silages and hays, providing feed for the dry period. Crop residues like stovers, straws, and husks are also valuable dry-season feed, especially for cattle and small stock. These residues can be enhanced with the Urea/Ammonia treatment method to increase their nutritional value and digestibility, thereby allowing the animals to get more energy from them.  

3. Breed Selection

Choosing the right animal breed is fundamental for adapting to the dry season. An animal must be adapted to tolerate the environmental stresses, and its nutritional requirements must align with the available feed. For instance, some indigenous African breeds, such as Tswana or Tuli cattle, often produce the highest weaner weights per cow compared to large exotic breeds, which require high levels of nutrition and management. 

4. Water Quality

Farmers must also constantly monitor water quality. During prolonged dry seasons or droughts, nitrate problems can increase significantly, particularly in surface water, posing risks to cattle. Coliform counts are also likely to rise in mud puddles. Water samples should be submitted for analysis if suitability is in doubt.

How Farmers Can Sustain Feeding and Livestock Health

To ensure livestock maintain productivity through the dry period, specific nutritional and health protocols must be implemented.

1. 1. Plan for feeding with budgeting. Feed budgeting is a strategic approach to planning the optimal allocation of limited feed for animals throughout the dry season. This process involves calculating livestock energy requirements, measuring available pasture and stored feed, and calculating the feed gap to determine cost-effective solutions. Key feed quality measurements such as Metabolisable Energy, Crude Protein, and Fibre are vital for meeting energy needs, especially for young stock, which suffer irreparable growth checks if nutrition is inadequate.
2. 2. Supplementary feeding: Since fresh grasses, which provide adequate nutritional value for animals, are being replaced by dried alternatives, supplementing them with other nutrient sources is important. Licks are a great source of nutrient supplements and the easiest way to give animals the minerals, protein, and energy they're missing.
3. 3. Conserve resources and prioritise: Even while working with a tight feeding budget, farmers need to find ways to conserve feed and water to sustain feeding for longer. One way to do this includes prioritising strategic stocks over others. Core breeding and pregnant female stocks, as well as younger ones and lactating mothers, will be prioritised over others in feeding. Farmers can also occasionally test the resilience of stock by moderately extending feeding intervals.
4. 4. Monitor activities and health indicators: Farmers should regularly monitor livestock activity during this period, as they are often stressed. Look out for isolated animals and those that exhibit persistent symptoms of a disease. While ensuring adequate nutritional intake, farmers must also regularly assess their body conditions, looking out for preemptive actions.
5. 5. Schedule treatment and vaccination: Worm infestations and stress-related diseases such as Pulpy Kidney (Enterotoxemia) and Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) are widespread during the dry season, especially when animals are concentrated or on the move. Scheduling or starting the dry season by deworming the animals to remove parasite load before stress sets in, and vaccination for pulpy kidney, are crucial steps to keep them healthy through the season. 

Faced with threats to animal health, fertility, and the economic stability of the farm, preparing for livestock farming is a necessity. It is not an optional activity for farmers who want to survive the severe challenges of the season. They can build resilience by planning, adopting sustainable pasture management techniques and monitoring animal health and activities to enable timely intervention.