Dry spell killing cattle and hope

ENTERPRISE — Rancher Leon Bowler hasn't seen a good rain since last October and says his ancestors, going back to the 1896 Mormon settlement of this desert farming town, probably never saw it so dry.

It's so dry in this town about 125 miles northeast of Las Vegas that Bowler sent hundreds of his cattle to Nevada, on average an even drier state than Utah, to graze for the summer. It's so dry, two of his neighbor's cattle dropped dead just from being moved from one scratchy pasture to another.

Almost everywhere in southern Utah ranchers who depend on surface waters are losing cattle. They can't sell the head at auctions because nobody wants to buy them, yet many ranchers can't afford to buy feed either.

Range cattle, weakened and exhausted, are losing weight, with a carcass here and there feeding crows and buzzards. The worst has yet to come with valley pastures set aside for winter grazing now bone-dry, sprouting none of the usual, irrigated knee-high grasses.

Utah is in the grip of a four-year drought, said Fred May, the state's hazard mitigation officer. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has declared all of Utah an agricultural disaster area.

Nowhere is the drought more severe than in Utah's southwestern corner. The mountains of the Dixie National Forest produced a scant snowpack last winter, leaving puddles in reservoirs that had been the lifeblood of hay croppers on the edge of Escalante desert.

"It's never been this dry in this country," said Bowler, not the worst-off rancher. "I've been here for 71 years and I've never seen anything like it."

He's drilling more and deeper wells as groundwater drops to 135 feet under his land from only 35 feet a century ago. Other, hardscrabble ranchers don't have the ways or means to tap groundwater that can be hundreds of feet deeper.

"After four years of drought, we're all broke, and the banks aren't lending us money," said Gayle Evans, 70, whose 600 head of cattle are practically starving. "I just don't know what to do about it."

On the other side of the mountains, Fenton Bowler shrugs at the offer of government help. A low-interest loan would do little for Bowler, 69, a third-generation rancher who could ill afford to pay it back.

"I'm going broke and out of business. The drought did it. I lost at least 30 cows," he said.

Bowler of Veyo says he hasn't seen a decent rain since February 2001. His pastures are "just a dust bowl," so like many ranchers he moved some cattle to northern Nevada, paying more for the trucking and grazing than they may be worth.