 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Travis Hoffman at North Dakota State University Extension. I serve as the Extension Sheep Specialist, but today I get to be our moderator for our webinar today that's focused on our 2021 drought outlook. A couple things to keep it in consideration is that this is the first of our series conducted by North Dakota State University Extension, and these are recorded and will be archived at www.ag.ndsu.edu slash drought. Just a suggestion, chats, and discussion amongst our participants can be put in the chat box. We will also ask that if you have a question that you wish to ask either of our panelists to put that in the Q&A section so that we can be able to keep those monitored and facilitate answering of your questions. Also, our next webinar will be on Thursday, February 18th on drought trigger dates and grazing strategies. With that, we have two talented speakers that are joining us, Dr. Adnan of Qs, who is our climate and our state, excuse me, our North Dakota State climatologist, and also Dr. Kevin Sedevic, who is the Extension Rangeland Management Specialist, and he also serves as a dual role as the Director of our Central Grasslands REC. With that, Dr. Accus, the floor is yours. Thank you. We look forward to your drought outlook. All right. Good morning. I should rather say good afternoon, otherwise in Fargo it is not morning yet. So with that, I am going to advance my slide to my next slide, and I'm going to ask you to pull out your telephones, your tablets, and using your computers. I want you to log in to or go to ttpol.com and make sure that you log in as a guest. It is going to ask you session ID and make sure you put drought, and then it is going to ask you your user ID and make sure you put your home county. For example, I put down CAS because I am from CAS County. I will wait for a few seconds for everyone to log in. This is going to be an interactive session and hoping that you would be able to enjoy and pay more attention, knowing that I would be asking some questions to you, and in order for you to be able to answer so I can act accordingly, this needs to be an interactive presentation. So hoping that you have done all that, you went to ttpol.com, you put down drought, and then when it asks your user idea, you put down your county rather than CAS County, and I am going to advance my slide to next one, and it is going to ask you your first question, and I see the answers coming in already indicating that you have successfully logged into ttpol.com and you entered drought as session ID and made sure that you put your county name, and I am paying attention to right here, total responders who looks like 17 people already responded, and looks like 55 participants are logged in remotely. Okay, looks like we have about 19, 20 students, students, I'm sorry, participants. I do teach daily too, so I apologize if I slip out some stuff that I usually tell my students. Okay, looks like the extension education 30% and LEM owner and the previous 25, this is exactly what I wanted to see. I am going to advance my slide in three seconds, two, one, and the polling is closed, and I wanted to know that if you're joining from the meeting room right now, if it is live or are you joining in remotely using Zoom, if I wanted to participate as well, I would pick B Zoom remotely. Looks like no one is in the room. Is that correct? Okay, maybe one person, four percent. Otherwise, 96% of the population, which is 25 responders out of 56, if you're joining in, I wanted you to go to ttpoll.com, and it is going to ask your session ID that is drought, and a next question answered to the next question is your county. So, with that, I am going to start my presentation. Polling is closed, 24 people participated. All right, this is last month, which is January. On the left-hand side, we have precipitation. On the right-hand side, it is temperature. This is how the convention is going to be from now on. 23rd, driest January at the same time, 125th, the coldest, that would be the same as third warmest January on record. And I am showing the United States, and you would know the what states are under what the conditions, and if you wonder, North Dakota is alone in that, and most of the northern plains are on the same boat. Now, I am zooming into North Dakota, and obviously, you're paying attention to the location that you live in, and you're spotting your own county. On the right-hand side, you notice that most North Dakota, all counties without an exception, completed January warmer than normal, and in fact, the entire state as an average, it was a third warmest. 125 means third warmest. If you see something that is larger, 126, that is the second warmest. And on the left-hand side, you already noticed that the precipitation lacked, and your observation is correct, especially if you live in the northeastern and the county, heading your county, and those are some of the top driest counties in January. When I include the other months prior to January for the past three-month periods, starting from November to January, on the right-hand side, you're looking at the temperature. 126 is the warmest the three-month periods in North Dakota, as well as in South Dakota. At the same time, you will notice that it is the fourth driest. Anytime when you have a drier and warmer than normal conditions, you put yourself in the situation for upcoming pretty much drier than normal. When you have a drought conditions already, that already alarms you. So with that in mind, I am going to do the same thing for the past three-month period, zooming into your county that you live in. On the left-hand side, the precipitation, you notice that the McKenzie County is the driest such periods from November to January, last three months. And on the right-hand side, you notice that it is the warmest. And so McKenzie County is experiencing not only the warmest, but at the same time, it is the driest. Really, it is the bad combination and entire North Dakota is somewhat either the first or the second, the warmest November through January period on record. Looking at the past 30-day period, on the left-hand side, it is the actual amount precipitation and green colors that indicate a greater amount of precipitation. However, when you look at the scale that you will notice that it is not really all that much precipitation. Even though some kind of precipitation did fall on the right-hand side, it is telling you that the percent of normal, red colors are indicating much drier, even brown colors are indicating much, much drier than normal conditions. And if you look into the past 60-day period, and you will notice, start noticing some kind of a pattern, even the longer period of time, you notice that McKenzie was the driest in North Dakota. And we start seeing between zero to five percent and sometimes the 10 percent of normal. So this is as dry as it will get. Any given day in the growing season, this county would have deserved to be in a much worse condition than just D2. So since it is the winter months and agriculturally hibernated periods, that is why that you are not going to see D3. And some of the conditions that request D3 is it requires major crop and pasture losses, widespread water shortages and restrictions. And that is not going to happen in winter month. That is why it is going to wait until the spring time for that to be in an elevated drought conditions. Talking about the drought conditions and you notice that D1 or some kind of a drought conditions, D1 by the way is the moderate drought and D2 is the highest level that we have so far in North Dakota. That is the severe drought. 91 percent of the county is experiencing some kind of drought. D0 is not drought. It is abnormally dry conditions. 58 percent of that land is under severe drought. And if I wanted to put some population into it, greater than 500,000 people in North Dakota is experiencing some kind of drought. Drought change on the left-hand side is during the past four weeks, green colors are indicating improvement of the drought. And that accounts for the precipitation that fell during the 30-day period and improvement from D3 into D2. It is still in drought. The map on the right-hand side is indicating six-month change. The only improvement that you see in the Morton and Burley counties, some precipitation was received in that area. But otherwise, most of the state is in deteriorating conditions in drought conditions. This graphic is an index that I created in 2007. Now it is adopted by the National Drought Mitigation Center called Drought Severity and Coverage Index. What it does is it multiplies the area of certain drought by weighted function. For example, if entire, for example, if you're looking at that last number, entire North Dakota is in D4, that would be 100 percent. Multiply by five, that would be 500. So the 500 would be the highest number. So looking at these graphics and higher the number is worse the drought condition is, allows me to look at my latest, this is the latest condition, latest index. It allows me to compare that drought, how often that drought happened compared to the past. The highest number ever happened in North Dakota was 329. That was in 2006. And the second highest number happened in 2017. That was 295. And currently, it is 249. 249. That's where you know that's where we stand. It only happened one, two, three, four, and five times in the past since 2000. So that tells you how serious this drought is. And this is just the winter. This is then instantaneous number. So if I wanted to calculate the actual impact of the drought, what I need to consider is that area under this curve. And that is what that slide is exactly going to do. And again, looking at these numbers may not mean much. But when I compare that data with the previous drought, and it is going to tell me that this current drought has been going since May 19, 2020, 39 weeks in a row when I calculate the area under the curve, that is nearly 6,000 such index. If I am looking at the soil moisture, for example, the darker colors are indicating drier soil. And here we are looking at most of the state under brown and very dark brown indicating from 1 to 2 percentile, meaning that if I have a 100 years of soil moisture data, and if I rank it from lowest or driest to wettest, the current drought or current soil moisture is going to be in the top two in such list. So looking at the outlooks, this is where we are here. Looks like this is the one-month February outlook based on the CPC. You're going to catch me saying that, but it is really climate prediction center, the authority for making long-term forecasts. On the left-hand side is the precipitation. Green color is indicating a bionormal precipitation in February. And on the right-hand side is the temperature. The reason why I chuckled in here is that, and so far in February, we have been dry. This is the actual data. And darker, the red colors are indicating drier the conditions are. This is up to now. And also, if I am looking at much better forecast, and this is the forecast is indicating during the next 16-day period, that is going to take us all the way into February 27. And most drier conditions are actually is going to happen in northwestern portions of the state. So I have no reason to believe this forecast is going to come true. So it is not going to come true because of the fact that we are already dry and the more accurate forecast is indicating it is going to be actually drier than normal. So map on the left side is not going to come true. How about the map on the right-hand side? That is temperature. Blue colors are indicating cooler than normal rest of the February. And that is a possibility because we already have the first 10 days in February much, much colder than normal. Green colors are indicating colder, but the blue is much, much colder than normal. If you look in the forecast, that is going to take into the February 20, much better forecast is telling me that we are going to continue being colder. How colder some of these numbers are negative 10. That means 10 degrees below average in southwestern portions of the state is even more 16.5 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal. So there is a better chance that the map on the right-hand side is going to happen, but the precipitation forecast is going to fail. Okay, looking further into the future, that is March 2 May, this is spring forecast. And that is the CPC or the Climate Prediction Center on the left-hand side. It is the precipitation. It is temperature on the right-hand side. White colors are indicating, well, let's start with the green color is the weather. Brown is drier and the white is equal chance of having above, below, or near normal. Most people will consider this as near normal, but it is not actually the, that means that the forecast does not have any skill to be able to make any distinction. And the same thing on the temperature. 33 percent chance of above, below, or near normal, equal chance. So when the conditions are like that, unfortunately, I won't be able to tell the producers or my clients or the audience that's really, if you don't know, or I must do something else. That's what I did. So I looked at the El Nino and Southern Oscillation, that's and so in, and timescale from 1990 to present. The line down below that zero line is indicating La Nina, that means cooling of the water in the equatorial Pacific region. And unfortunately, what happens in that portion of the area does not stay in that portion of the area. It impacts everything downstream, especially when we have La Nina situation in the wintertime especially. Usually the wintertime in North Dakota will be colder than normal and wetter than normal. And unfortunately, neither happened, neither happened, and let me show you what happens. These are all La Nina cases and the red colors are above normal temperature during the La Nina reason. And almost all pictures are indicating cooler than normal. And that's where the cooler than normal temperatures are associated with La Nina. And here's what happened so far. So far, this is everything but cooler than normal winter. This is January and December. And notice that the North Dakota is experiencing the warmest January, December on record. So the maps on the right hand side is going to be obsolete other than those, the circles that you see. So you have many months, many and so episode that was cooler, but certain ones they really did not follow 1999, 2000, for example, 88, 99, 2005, 2006, and 2011, 12. Among that, these two particular seasons really match with what is going on right now. So my idea is why don't I take these seasons as an analog to see what happens from here forward. So that is my forecasting skill. Here is the current conditions December and January. This is current winter. And this is what happened in 2006. Conditions are very similar in 2012. This is 2011, 2012 winter. So I hope that you are going to appreciate how difficult that is to find among all 140 years in record to be able to distinguish two particular the season that is similar to what happened to current conditions. So I am taking 2006 and 2012 as an analog years and moving forward into spring. So this is if I take 2006, the spring 2006 was 14th warmest spring. And yes, I am expecting spring to be warmer than normal. And also looking at 2012, it is the second warmest spring. So it looks like the fore-using this forecast is going to work. So what I am going to do is I'm going to ask you to go back into ttpole.com. So I have a question coming up next. I hope that your computer handheld device still remembers that login IDs. And while you are doing that, I also looked at the growing degree day comparison in 2006 and 2012. This is growing degree days. I use end-on system to calculate growing degree days for corn, for example. Starting from April 1st through September 30, the map on the left-hand side is 2006, map on the right-hand side is 2012. What I am going to ask you is to look at your county and memorize that number. I know the numbers are not going to mean anything to you for now other than some ranchers and the growers. They would probably know what that means. So go ahead and select your county and memorize that number. It is going to be handy next. So the next graphic is going to tell me, let me activate my pencil. So remember that accumulated growing degree days from this map. For example, if I am on Cass County, I am remembering 2542. So I am going to my next graphic, 2500. On the vertical axis, I find it. It is right here. So I am going to go horizontal as good as I can go. And until I hit this line, that is my line. What I am going to do next is I am going to go vertical right here. That is the relative maturity days of the corn that is suitable for that kind of accumulating growing degree days. That is between 100 and 105-day corn. So in case and the next question is going to be, I hope you are still logged in, which corn hybrid did the growing degree day correspond in your county? And I see that a lot of people paid attention and they were successfully be able to estimate the corn hybrid that is suitable for that kind of accumulated growing degree days in 2012 or 2006. Looks like 11 people participated. I will wait a few more seconds. Three seconds, for example, two, one. And I will hit next to close the poll. Looks like between 85 to 105-day corn is going to be most popular in North Dakota next growing season if 2012 or 2006 repeats in the next growing season. So that is what the forecast said. But this question, I want to know what kind of hybrid do you plan to plant in the next growing season with that information? Or you may not want to listen to that information. You may have something in mind and you are going to do that regardless of what information is presented to you based on your experience. And yes, I was expecting you to be more conservative. I saw in the previous slide that there were some actually 17% between 100 and 105 days. And now when it is time for you to make a decision, you are becoming more conservative. That is the message that I wanted to see in this graphic. Okay, in three seconds, I will advance to one and the polling is closed on the next. Up until now, it was a temperature. And I know that you are wondering what is going to happen in terms of precipitation. Okay, now on the left hand side and what we have so far from December through January, right here on the left hand side, it looks like it is very dry. And in fact, it is the 10th driest December through January conditions in North Dakota. On the right hand side, all La Nina events and again, La Nina usually correspond weather than normal and green colors will indicate weather than normal conditions. And almost all of that except for 2005, 2006, again, 2011, 2012. So with that in mind, what I will do is I am going to add October through January precipitation because usually what happens in North Dakota or such place in the Northern Plains when the ground freezes and the precipitation is snow, usually it stays until spring and becomes available for planting, infiltration, moistening your soil. That is why that we use the water year for precipitation instead of seasonal changes. So with that in mind, I am looking at what happened currently up to this point from October, pretty much dry actually. It is the third driest water year period in North Dakota, third driest. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to make a similarity between 2005, 2006 season and 2011, 2012. It looks like 2006 really didn't match. It isn't the odd abnormality and looks like 2012 really fits not only precipitation, but with the temperature as well. So I might as well look at 2012 and notice that it is not the driest actually, it is 29 driest. The next slide is going to tell me I am still including 2006 for spring just in case 2006 spring happened to be the 58th driest, but really it is not one of the driest. And but 2012 spring was wet. Remember second driest turn into a wet actually in some counties to the north. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. That means even the year 2012, such dry period is followed by 52nd wettest spring. This is 2012. So I can go to town with that information maybe go further into summer. So this is the summer 2012 period. And again, I have to make a disclaimer, making such the forecast into a further into summer and even fall is dangerous because it is so much far from the the forecasting period. And here is on the left hand side is the precipitation. Right hand side is the temperature and 19th driest summer with 16th warmest summer. That was in 2012. So I am using 2012 as an analog to make a forecast for summer 2021. And the next is going to be a little to go on further into the fall. I am sure the questions are going to be what is going to happen during the next growing season all the way into the fall. So you can make a informed decision. And 2012, the fall was 47th driest and 57th coldest. So the cold fall is going to follow warm summer. If you wanted to look at the the entire growing season from April through September, on the left hand side is the precipitation 13th driest such period and the 7th warmest such period in the warmer. Sometimes it's a good news. It allows you to accumulate more growing degree days for the plant that you have. So that is exactly what is going to come up. As a summary, I know that we did a lot of scenarios. But as a summary, if you must take one slide home, and this would be the page, in spring, warmer than average, warmer than average spring, regardless of what analog use, either 2006 or 2012. And in terms of the precipitation, near normal rains will return. This is based on 2012, which which really fits better than 2006 actually, which is a great news. In the summer, warmer and drier than average summer fall near normal in temperature and rain. For the entire growing season, warmer and drier than average growing season, greater than average growing degree day accumulation is the rule during the next growing season. So one more question. I hope you'll still be able to participate in this one. This is this is for me. And the question is asking how helpful do you think did you find this information? And of course, this will be for your operation. I was hoping to see the positive, but not this positive really very helpful, which is very encouraging for me 15 participants. In three seconds, I will move it to the next slide to one. And the polling is almost closed. How likely are you to incorporate that information in your decision making for the next growing season? Okay, the polling is open. Just one more. This is my last slide. How likely are you to incorporate that information in your decision making for the next growing season? Right, I will finish the slide and the PowerPoint presentation in three seconds to one. And the polling is closed. And the next is my contact information. I am paying attention to the chat to see if there are any questions and hoping that someone would ask me the questions. We have one question is you do compare the NOAA to other models such as the ECMWF and the European models. How do you feel about the ECMWF? Okay, ECMWF is short for the European model. And unfortunately, the European model does not let me look into the next three-month period or next six-month period. Otherwise, I use ECMWF all the time for the next 10-day period. And in fact, some of the data that I used in the past is ECMWF if I can find that right here. This is ECMWF and telling me what the precipitation is going to be. Actually, this is temperature into February 20. Beyond that, it is not usable. Any other question, Travis? A question, how much on the growing degree days that you showed with that number? How much variance is there around those numbers? I know obviously there is some from region to region, but from year to year, obviously you picked the two that are closest and representative of 2021. Yeah, I only used 2006, 2012, and these are actual data. So there is not much variance. And the only variance would be associated with the how GDD works. It starts from the 50-degree base versus some other base. But from year to year, we all are indexed. The farmers know what 2500 means and based on the experience what happened in the past. Otherwise, that is not much variance because 2006, 2012, these are actual data. And you shared that from your previous and past history is that some of the producers will trend to a slightly smaller number of growing days just to make sure that we can make it through and get those corn harvest finished. And would that be the correct evaluations? Yeah, these are actually the greater than normal amount of growing degree days compared to normal. So we should be able to accumulate more growing degree days in a shorter period of time. And by the time the fall time comes, and by the way, 2012, both 2016, gave us a longer growing season at the same time too, meaning that the first day of fall frost came much later. So that is another advantage. And the soil moisture, right now maybe we'll just grab that. The soil moisture, as we move into the growing season, we have to keep that into consideration. Is it too early to kind of project that just depending on where we're going to be in March, April, May then? Or what's your thoughts there? So unfortunately, the western North Dakota is snow-free. If you're looking at the snow sitting on the ground areas, it is limited to eastern North Dakota and some areas in eastern North Dakota too. And if spring comes, they usually rely on what I call savings account. That is the snow sitting on the ground becoming available in springtime. In case spring doesn't bring in a rain, they always fall back on the melted amount of snow. And that is not going to happen in western North Dakota. And drier than normal, drier than normal spring is not a good news either. So you neither have any money left in the savings account, but also the forecast is telling you that the less amount of the precipitation is going to fall, especially in the western North Dakota, is telling you that you must have some precipitation in springtime for a decent agricultural season to start. Thank you, Dr. Cues. With that, we're going to move on to our next talented speaker, Dr. Kevin Sedevic, our rangeland management specialist. Kevin, go ahead. The floor is yours. Thank you, Travis. Can you hear me fine? Well, good afternoon. I do appreciate you copping on our webinar today. And I'm going to kind of follow Adnan's pattern of looking at forecasting, looking at forecasting forage production based on what we saw in 2020. And I'm going to kind of do the same thing that we saw from Adnan is looking at past years to kind of help us look at what we can expect for 2021. And so we're going to look at these forecasts and look at dealing with 2021. So what I want to do is show, and I know Adnan showed some of these maps, but I think it's important to understand the realm or the impacts of the drought we're seeing in 2020 and 2021 on a national scale. And we think it's been tough in the Dakotas, but you can look in Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona and even now in Eastern Texas, how dry it is. And it's important to understand that about 60% of our cattle producers are currently under a drought effect. And so if you're looking at your strategies in place and you need to buy hay, it's just going to get tough. And so you need to have a plan in place to look at these long-term impacts on how it's going to affect the cattle industry as a whole. And then we'll look at North Dakota as well. I got a picture of North Dakota. And this is the growing season departures from normal for 2020. And this is May through October. And it kind of gives you a feel of where we're at in the States. We take away the Southwest East part of the state. Much of the state was at 50, 40, 60% of normal precipitation throughout that growing season and how it's impacted our production. So I did circle this area and I've traveled much of the state, even during our COVID year, I was able to get out in much of the state. And you can see this area in red really was hit hard by drought and impact in terms of production. The beauty of it, and we'll talk about soil moisture, is that much of us still produced a crop or at least produced good forage production because of the subsoil moisture we carried over from 2019. So this is, I don't have to talk about snow. And so I took the months of November, December, January for this year and showed departure of moisture from normal over the last three months. And what's interesting, you look at Minot in Ward County, it's at 2% of normal moisture. And you can see that hit again, Mary. You can see this circle here. We're looking at really 20, 25% of normal moisture in the wintertime. As a range ecologist or rancher, the use of snow in terms of forage production is really minimal. Where it becomes important is snow cover for those crops that need snow cover. If you have a winter cereal or if you have alfalfa, you may have to think about potential for winter kill that may occur in those crops. What's more important that I think when it comes to 2021, if you have stock dams or dugouts, we rely on moisture from our snowpack to regenerate these dugouts. And so if you're relying on a dugout in 2021, I think you need to strategize of what you're going to do if you don't get the moisture in place. Two, you may have to look at those pastures and graze them early while you have water in them. The other caveat is most of these dugouts that get low also become toxic in terms of total dissolved solubles as well as sulfates. And so if you're going to go into some of these dugouts that are low, I highly recommend visiting with your extension agent and having these tested to make sure they are safe for your livestock. So let's look at, and there was a question came up earlier about subsoil moisture coming into 2021. So for me, I'm going to look at the fall moisture patterns that we saw in 2020 and compare them to 2019 to see why we'll see these differences. And right on the border, our subsoil moisture is going to be extremely low for 2021. So this is a graph of four locations in North Dakota. We have Streeter, Williston, Bowman, and Minot. And the blue bar is 2019. And on the average of just these four locations, we sat about 160 to 280 percent above normal moisture in the fall of 2019. And this is what saved us in 2020. Even though we may have dropped conditions in 2020, much of our pasture lands still retained good production because of that carrier over moisture. Now look at 2020, just look at Williston on that one graph. They're at 15% of normal precip in the months of January, actually October, November, December, January. Streeter is actually the best one and we're at 55% of normal. So we know we're going to go into 2019 with below normal subsoil moistures. So that bank is really depleted. In some case, it's gone. So let's, let's, let's review. I'm going to go back and review 20 years of data that has, and this is a rare case to get this, but we have 20 years of data that has forged production for each year. And then we can take a look at precip that may have dropped, drove that, that production across the years. So what I'm going to try and do is over this 20 year period, try and find years that mimic 2020, a drought year with no moisture in the fall. How does that impact the next year? And we're going to, I'm going to look at growth patterns here, so you understand why I'm going to use the times I use. So in the Northern Plains, whether you're in North Dakota, South Dakota, even in Eastern Montana, Eastern Wyoming, we grow most of our grass from the precipitation that occurs from April to June. If you're in Montana, it's really April and May. If you're in the Dakotas, it's May and June. And that's the time period is critical for forge production in the Northern Plains. So this is some, we collected some data back in the nineties and early 2000s looking at growth curves of our grasses. And so the, the red bar is the growth curve for Western wheatgrass. And you can see it reaches the peak production by the end of June, about 80% of its growth occurs with that time period for our warm season grass. And my example here is blue grandma. It reaches about 90% of its growth by the end of July. So much of the Northern Plains, especially in the Cato region of the Dakotas, even into Southern Canada, bluegrass is the common grass we find in our prairies. And you can see bluegrass here reaches peak production by July one. And then it actually drops down throughout the season. So the critical time period for moisture that's going to drive forge production is really the months of May and June. And so we need to have moisture at this time period. If we're going to have a good year or a bad year, the other caveat to it is, is the fall and the fall will dictate that the health of the grass going into the winter. It will also dictate growth the following spring. So if you have a dry spring and a dry fall, we're in deep trouble. And so we're going to come into 2021 with a dry fall and we actually already had the dry spring. So remember this kind of curve and how impacts forge production. So I know this is a noisy slide. So this is the data that Bob Patton collected over a 20 year period at Central Grasslands Research Station. And so each one of these red bars is the forge production for the year 1990 through 2009. The dotted red bar is the average forge production over that 20 year period. The blue line is precipitation in the month of June, May and June for each one of those years. And the black line is 100% of normal precipitation. And you can see only in 2001 do we actually hit 100%. So it's fairly rare to actually meet 100%. The bars up on top, the two dashes tells you it was a dry fall. And the two pluses I have there actually show you where we had a wet fall. And so I'm going to take this and break this up a little bit. But one thing that's interesting, if you look at 2007, 2008 and 2009, you can see we were really wet in 2007. We were slightly dry in 2008 production was normal. We were extremely dry in 2009. We came out of a high moisture fall period. So production was still there, which is why we saw in 2019, even though we were dry in 2020, we had all this moisture that really saved us. But now we've depleted that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to certain years to kind of prove the point of where we're going to look at for 2021. We'll look at 1992, which was an average precip year coming off of a dry fall. We'll look at 2020, 2002, which was a drought year coming after a dry fall. And we'll look at 2006, another drought year coming after a dry fall. And so two of these periods are very similar to what we saw in 2020. The caveat is this 1992, we came in and had normal precipitation the fall and year. So I'm going to give you some scenarios. So let's look at that first one 1992. So in 1990, we had an above normal precip year, about 121%. And we grew above normal forage production. And it was actually a normal fall that year. We came into 1991, we were about 70% a normal precip, but we had a good fall. So our forage production was at average, but we had a very dry fall in 91. The next year we come back, we actually have a normal precip in 1992, but we still lost 20% of our biomass produced because of the fall dry period. So a normal precip year following a droughty fall will lose biomass the following year. So let's look at 2002. And I added more bars here because it tells more of a story. But in 1999, we had a high producing forage production year at 3,300 pounds an acre. It was a wet year. We had 145% of normal precip. We had a normal fall. We come into 2000. We had a droughty scenario, about 75% of normal precip. We still produce more biomass because of the carryover moisture. Normal fall, we come into 2001. We have normal precip. So we have normal production, but we have a drought in the fall or droughty conditions in the fall. Then we lead into 22. We're at 52% of normal precip. Following a fall period, we lost over half of our biomass year when we compile a fall drought followed by a summer drought. That year was interesting was we actually had a dry fall as well. But if you look at 2003, we had 160% of above normal precipitation and all we got was normal production, which tells me that if we'd had a normal year in 2003, we would have had a below normal production year. And we'll show that in a different scenario. So it kind of gives you a feel for how lack of fall moisture, a drought can really impact forage production the following year. So let's look at 2006. And if you remember right, Adnan talked about 2006. And I remember 2006 very well. I remember being in the field, in the big town of Zealand, working in July, I thought they're for five days, it hit 105 to 110 degrees every day. So it was hot. So we look at 2005, we actually had above normal precip at 140%. But we had a dry fall. We come into the drought of 2006, we read about 60% normal precip, but it was hot. So we had a lot of evaporation in the system. And we had 38% loss of forage production. Again, following a dry fall into a drought, we lose this production. Fortunately, in 2006, we had a normal fall precipitation. And then we got into 2007 and we're at 185% of normal precipitation. And that will save us every day of the week. You can see our production in 2007 was over, was about 20% over normal. And it took all that rain to do that. So let's look at where we're at now today. So we look at 2020. On the research station, we lost about 25% of our average production, our production from average. So in 2018, we had 112% normal precip, which tells me it's in that wet realm of normal precip with a really nice wet fall. We come into 2019 with a wet fall and high moisture. And you can see we're at over almost 4,500 pounds per acre. So it was a really good year for forage production. We had that wet fall. We come into the drought of 2020. And so we had a loss of production, but it was minimal, in my opinion, because the fall was moist. So we're going to come into 2021 following a drought and a dry fall, which is going to set us up for for probably at best normal production if we have a wet year. So let's look at our scenarios based on this data. So before I go on, I was intrigued, did we ever have back to back to back years of droughts or two year droughts, which we always say to producers, you can handle a one year drought, but a two year drought, you're going to have to do something to modify because you just not get the biomass. So in 97 and 98, we were at about 50 to 70 percent normal precip. But you look at the forage production, we were at or slightly below forage production. So why did we not have an impact on those droughts in terms of forage production? So what happened in 1996, we were slightly dry, but we had a wet fall. So we came into 97 slightly below average because we had to carry over moisture in 97. We had a normal fall. That's the zero means normal fall coming into about 80 percent of our precip. We still were able to maintain a production because we did have the moisture in the fall period. So the rule I want to get across here is you can see the value of that spring moisture and almost as in value as what happened in the fall that will impact your production. So let's look at a drought scenario. If we're going to go into 2021, below normal spring moisture, we have no carry over subsoil. What can you inspect in terms of losses in terms of forage production? Because I guarantee you you're going to have a loss in terms of forage production. So based on the past data, if we come in below normal precip, and I'm talking May and June, you can expect a severe reduction in forage production based on the data anywhere from 35 to 65 percent production, depending on heat and depending on soil types. So with producers and I've been telling this for the last couple of months, be prepared for less grass, especially if we're below normal precipitation. So let's look at normal spring moisture scenarios. Will we go back to normal? And the answer really is no. Because we were so depleted this fall, even at normal precipitation in 2021, you should expect a loss in production by give or take 20, 25 percent. Whether that impacts your management, that's a decision you'll decide. But for us, you'll make a decision how to deal with that 20, 25 percent, even under normal precipitation events. If your pastures were overgrazed in 2020, and we typically see this with drought scenarios, is we'll see pastures tend to get hit a little harder. Those pastures will experience even greater losses of forage production due to the stress of those grasses. So how about if it's wetter than normal? Or we got wet spring moisture, which we're all hoping we get some wet moisture this spring. I would expect if you're above normal precipitation in May and June is 125 to 150 percent of normal, you will probably have near normal production. It will take that much extra moisture just to bring you back to normal. If you have pastures that were grazed properly or under stock, so they came in healthy, they weren't stressed, you could actually expect above normal precipitation, above normal production, because of that precipitation. The only thing that's going to bring it out to where we actually produce more biomass is if we're going to get 160, 170 percent of moisture in the month of May and June. All right, so we talked about production. We kind of get a feel for how moisture this coming year is going to impact forage production. On an average, if we just are going to have average year, producers need to be prepared for less production. So let's look at grazing readiness as it relates to 2021 and what we can expect for turnout in the May, this coming May. And it's important to understand that our grasses reach a point where they become what I call grazing readiness. And your goal when you have pastures is to have reduced bare ground. You want to maintain litter or healthy cover on your soil to increase plant bigger. And so I'm going to give you two scenarios here. And this data comes from Rick Schmidt, the county agent and center around in Oliver County. And this is data that Dr. Brandon Meehan put together, looking at range readiness and how it may vary from year to year. And so in this example, we're using Western wheatgrass. In Oliver County, we're going to look at a Western wheatgrass. On May 9th of 2017, we were at the three leaf stage, which is the stage we usually recognize for grazing readiness. And it was eight inches tall. So to really look at how that may have been impacted, we look at the previous fall. And in 2016 fall moisture, we were at 100% of normal. So on May 5, normal precip, eight inches tall, three and a half leaf. So let's go one year forward. This is now 2018. Oliver County in the fall of 2017 experienced only 42% of normal precip in the fall. And that impacted plant growth in the spring. You need to remember that our first grass that grows in the spring is already available in the fall. So the tiller that's that last leaf that's available is what's going to grow the next spring. If we have a drought in the fall, most of those tillers actually die. So now the growth in the spring has to come from the root rhizomes. And this was a delayed growth. So in this scenario, following a drought, five days later, May 14th, 2018, Western wheatgrass was only at the one and a half leaf stage and only three inches tall. Moral of story, producers need to understand that 2021, you're going to see a delay in production in the month of May, and a delay in turnout because of the range readiness of these species. So we look at great, the reason we look at grazing to early, the big negative to this, if it's not ready, you lose leaf area, you get plant bigger problems, and you get a loss of forage production. And this leads to increase in disease and increase with insect infestations. And then you start to see these annual weeds start to show up in these scenarios. So what are my recommendations for optimizing range performance? And I'm going to start with kind of the obvious, we know a question is turn out to pasture when it's ready. And we know that in 2021, it's going to be delayed. So what are your options? If you have crested wheatgrass or you have smooth bromegrass pastures, there are great opportunity to turn cows out in that month of May. The other caveat is, is both these two grasses will also have a delay in production, just like the native species. So normally if you go out on your crested on May one, May five, it's probably going to be delayed probably by five to 10 days. If you have winter cereals, winter cereals are a great opportunity, like a winter rye or a winter triticale to spring graze in that month of May. The caveat to this is because of the open winter, we could see more winter kill on our winter cereals. And that may be an issue you'll have to look at. So let's look at turn out pasture when ready. So the other issues you're going to deal with, if you know you're going to have to delay turnout, do you have enough feed or have enough hay? And if you can figure out your hay supply, if you need to purchase hay, and I know about that, I just purchased hay last week for the station, plan to purchase the hay now. If you look at the hay markets, the hay markets actually still fairly average or weak, that's going to change in the next month or two. So if you need to buy hay, buy it now, not in the month of April or May. If you're going to start grazing early, because you really don't have any choice, try to not overgraze, go on an overgraze pasture for 2020. So find your pastures that have the least amount of use and use those pastures for your early turnout, knowing you're going to have to defer that for later in the season or arrest it. So the one thing we try to always talk about is, you know, the impacts of overgrazing. The beauty of the northern plains, I don't care if you're in South Dakota, North Dakota, even the eastern Montana Wyoming areas, these grasslands are fairly resilient and can handle a one-year overuse event. It's the repeated use that we see in overgraze pastures that have a negative impact. So let's end with some take-home messages. So develop your drought management strategies now. If you haven't developed your strategies, develop them as soon as possible. We've been telling producers the last couple months, be prepared for a drought, have your strategies in place. And over the next five webinar series, we're going to talk about strategies that you can have in place to put that drought management plan so it works effectively for you. If precipitation is low in May through mid-June, you're going to need to start implementing your drought strategy early. Every producer should have a fairly good feel for by the middle of June if you're going to have a good year, a bad year, or an average year. You really know by mid-June. So let's look at if we get some summer rains. So we get a dry spring and we get some summer rains. We're all pretty happy. We're excited about it. The caveat to summer rains, and you can see it in the data, they don't add more biomass. We grow about 80% of our growth will occur by that July one day. So if you get rains in July and August, it will green up. It will look pretty, but your biomass increase is never more than about 20%. So the beauty of it is forage quality will be better, but you won't add biomass to the system. If you need to overgraze, and you know, I hate talking about this caveat, but if you need to overgraze, what should I do? So limit your overuse to one to two pastures and allow deferment of those pastures the next year for recovery. They're very resilient. As long as you give them enough rest and recovery, they will come back. Our pastures in range in North Dakota are very resilient. If you have a two-year drought, and we're going to talk about this next week, what are your strategies or options when you get back to back to your droughts? In reality, you're going to have to de-stock or you're going to have to do something because you're not going to have the biomass in those two years of strategies. So let's talk about some grazing management next week on some options to make you more resilient and then look at how you're going to manage your stocking. Do you add more livestock? Do you add more land to that system to minimize the damage? Or do you look at other options that you're going to put in for emergency feeds? So management recommendations for 2021. Increase plant beggar by delaying spring turnout at the proper time. If drought continues, early adjustments of stocking rate will need to occur, or if you have to go out in that month of May, you're going to have to deal with that on the backside of your grazing system. So you may have to come off earlier, and what are you going to look at for some options? You're probably going to look at emergency forage crops, which ones to plant. You're going to look at cover crops and use your residue grazing cover crops effectively during that time period to get you off your range to save it. So from that's my last slide. I do want to remember before we get into discussions next week at one o'clock. February 18th, we'll have the drought trigger dates and strategies and we'll talk about grazing strategies to enhance drought resiliency in your pastures. Travis, I'll turn it back to you. Thank you, Dr. Sedevic. A quick question that came in here just at the back end of the discussion, and we'll kind of transition through this, is how does temperature affect our available grass in the spring? How does temperature affect our available grass in the spring? So temperature is a driver, or what I call your odd and untalented growing degree days, but your grasses will grow, give or take seven to 10 days in the spring. So if you have a warm spring, moisture is not limited, you can get as much as seven days earlier growth and readiness with temperature. Okay, thank you. And Adnan, I believe that you're with us. You've gotten the opportunity to see what Mr. Darrell Roth had put together. So we're going to open that up and let you attack some of the questions that he had primarily on kind of some of the sun and that's a fact. Actually, the sun is not the major driver of the atmospheric temperature increase. It is the sun sends a shorter wave radiation that is not trapped by the atmospheric gases. It is only trapped once the sun radiation is absorbed by the earth's soil and then re-radiate as a long wave of radiation. And that time, certain gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, CFCs, or better known as greenhouse gases. And that is how the atmosphere warms up. And so that is why the incoming solar radiation is less to D with the warming of the atmosphere, but it is more to do with the earth. So that means what is on the earth's surface becomes more important in redistribution of the heat in the atmosphere across the globe. Otherwise, by just looking at the sunspot, it would really not explain why we have differences in the temperature pattern across the globe. And otherwise, it would make a same impact here in North Dakota and does the same thing in Siberia, Russia. And of course, the sun is very important, but you got to keep in mind that the earth's atmosphere warms up from the earth's surface from bottom up. That's why the earth's surface, the temperatures are higher. And as you move away from the source, which is the earth's surface, not the sun, earth's surface, away from the surface, the temperature decreases. It is just because what the earth's surface is made up of soil, grasses, fields, newly plowed fields, surfaces, any surface type, or the manmade or the natural made structures in the earth's surface makes all to do with the distribution of the heat across the globe. Thank you, Adnan. A quick question. So as a result, this is for Dr. Sadovic, right? And so as a result of good, crazy management over many years, we think we have built water use efficiency. If so, where does that soil moisture come from? So that's a great point to talk about. And good, crazy management is designed to store water better and deeper in the soil profile. And I think that's where it gets to these issues of or at least these benefits of strategies that you can actually get into two years. And so what you're trying to do is create a situation that stores water and a healthy root system. And that you can't build that in one or two years. So producers who have been doing this for 10, 20 years, they see this benefit because of the health of the soils and the health of the roots. Here's one, Kevin as well. And maybe we'll touch on this a little bit later. But just when when you're looking at those grasses, what is kind of some of the indicators there of where you're looking at the one leaf, two leaf, three leaf, you said about three, three and a half is kind of the stage. Is that correct? Yeah. So based on the data out of the USDA airway station in Mandan, they've tested the growing degree days that were growth consumes less carbohydrates once it reaches that stage than it actually uses trying to grow. So for native grasses, most of them fall in the three and a half leaves. So you have three full flag leaves and a fourth leaf coming up. If you have crested wheatgrass, smooth brome, they reach grazing redness around the three leaf stage. And so when we go out and we've done random rehabs on this for over a few years, we tend to teach producers how to do this. It's fairly simple. You're looking at those leaves. And when that next one comes up, you're going to the half stage. Kevin, as you think about this, again, most of our individuals are currently or most of the individuals that are in the West as Adnan said, projecting at least a lower precip right now. And in fact, as we think about it for next week and kind of developing those plans, I know those are some of the questions. Is there any particular homework? And we talked about some of the strategies that if we were to give individuals goals to write down so that they can say, this is something that I'm interested in and that we'll talk about kind of next week of saying, hey, these are some action items and let them brainstorm. Sure. One thing I would definitely look at is your water sources for 2021. Knowing that we're not going to have much snow, you need to think about how you're going to use those stock, those pastures with stock ponds and dams. Do you have them? Use them early. So strategize using those pastures to both effectively you can. I think no matter what happens this winter, I think we're going to have a below average year in terms of forage production, especially in the Western Dakotas where we have more drier soils. We also have greater evaporation that occurs in the West. So I think producers need to think about what are they going to do if they have to do a cut in a minimum of 20%. Do they have alternatives for grazing? Do they have animals within the herd that they can call early? But the biggest thing I'd look at is what are your options for grazing that you can have for late in the season that you can plan on? So if you've got to plant something, do you have to plan a forage barley? Do you have to plan a cover crop? If you're going to plant a crop, you need to look at purchasing those seeds today because it doesn't get difficult to find certain seed species as we get closer to the season. So I would also look at that strategy as well. And just be prepared as best you can to deal with less production. Think about your pastures and where you have pastures that weren't grazed very hard that have the potential to be grazed harder in 2021. No one you're going to have to defer it the following year. But strategize your grazing for 2021. Most producers have already done that to some level, but you need to figure out, do you need to modify that due to water and due to grazing scenarios to fit your operation the best? And if you do have to purchase hay, I'm telling you you need to look at purchasing hay now because it's going to get more expensive. As the price of corn goes up, which we've all seen go up, price of forages and hay follows that trend. And so we'll see the hay market also increase as the corn market increases. Well, that that's certainly some good information. In fact, Kevin, that's how talented you are there as you took my next question relative to some of the hay and the purchasing. So it's get a step ahead if you can so that we can have that. And I thought that was very good information, of course, so that if that's the correct answer or to have our cover crops so that we don't send those animals out there that could potentially do greater amount of damage if we were to turn those cows and animals out there on our pasture too early. Adnan, do you have anything particular that you would like to provide for us for a summary of your presentation here on our drought outlook? And we'll kind of summarize this up and move forward. Yeah, springtime is looking for drier and warmer than normal. And incidentally, it makes me remind, remember myself that there was a question regarding to soil moisture. Keep in mind that the soil is as dry as it gets this time of the year. And some of the impact that the soil moisture is going to provide is that if the soil is dry, limited evaporation is going to take place. When you have a limited evaporation, that means less water is going to be added into the atmosphere where it could return to the earth as precipitation. So when you have a dry soil, you take that ability of the soil providing local moisture at a local location. That makes the drought even prolong into the future. At the same time, in the temperature case, what it does is when the soil is dry and it limits the evaporation when the evaporation is limited, it takes the ability of the evaporative cooling. That means all that incoming solar radiation is utilized to warm the area. That is one reason that we had such a much warmer than normal conditions in the early winter season. And that made it look like a elongated fall season. When you have a dry soil drier than normal winter, you're most likely to enter into the spring drier and warmer than normal conditions. So that's what soil moisture does. And unfortunately, it is not looking great in terms of eliminating the drought. And right now, most drought prone areas in the western North Dakota, extending from Divide Burke County to the north, and all the way going down the Adams and the Bowman County, and especially if you're in McKinsey County, it is if that was a regular growing season, those areas would be in D3. And we all are waiting for ground to fall and the snow to melt so that we can bring those conditions into perhaps D3 conditions when we have more impact. And I think that is going to happen early spring, knowing that it is already dry, lack of soil, drier than normal soil moisture. Everything is pointing towards that is drought is going to prolong, especially into the first half of spring. Well, you're a realist, Dr. Accus. So thanks for at least providing us the information and guidance. And I'd also like to keep it in consideration that our colleagues that we have at North Dakota State University Extension and thank our team for being at the front of this, even as we're in February, and kind of looking forward. And again, I get to the opportunity to work with some great people. And of course, we have Dr. Kevin Sedevic. We do have a, this is the first of our series on our drought management. And we will have another section of our series next week on February 18th. Dr. Kevin Sedevic and Dr. Miranda Meehan will be touching on drought trigger rates and the grazing strategies. And so we're going to ask you, Kevin, and this will be our last question for today's event is if you have any particular things that you would like to summarize or transition or leave some tidbits of excitement for people to expect and to keep them coming back because we've had great participation here today. And thank you for all of us that joined us virtually. And we look forward to doing some in-person events here as we continue and move on as well. I just want to end with saying, for the ranchers on this call or the Zoom meeting, do plan and have a good plan in place that deals with your land, your water, and your livestock and even your family. And so I think based on what we've seen, it's going to be a dry fall. And I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm an optimist. I'm hoping we get all the rain we can handle in the month of May and June that we can get us through it, but just be prepared to deal with it. So next week we'll cover these what we call trigger dates and we'll talk about if it's dry at different times of the year, what are your strategies in terms of grazing strategies, forage strategies that you're going to look at to get you by in those scenarios. I know we'll have a later Zoom webinar that talks about the livestock side and we'll leave that for that time period. And so if I leave with that, think about your drought plan and how you're going to manage your drought plans to be effective for 2021. Well, congratulations and thank you Kevin for providing homework or more importantly, at least some direction. And we look forward to everybody. Again, this will be recorded and archived and available at our NDSU website. And so it's an exciting time with phase one of our series on drought management. And ladies and gentlemen, hopefully you have a joyous Thursday and that everything works out and that we don't have to manage drought, but we will look at it from a risk management standpoint as best we can. Thanks, have a great day.