“The grass should be up to here,” Janie VanWinkle says, holding a hand next to her knee above the scant growth on her ranch in Colorado, which — just as in 2020, and 2018 — is again being hit by devastating drought. “Here we are again,” she says, wearing a checkered shirt and a persistent smile that belies her ranch’s woes at a time when record high temperatures have been scorching much of the US West. “The soil moisture is just completely depleted, you can dig down four feet and there’s no moisture in the dirt. So that’s the cumulative effect that makes it tougher than previous droughts.” But the drought is only one of many challenges facing ranchers, not only in Mesa County where she lives, but across the West. “The drought’s right here in your face, you never get away from that,” she says. “So it feels like we are always under attack, whether it’s ‘fake’ meat, wolves, animal rights, environmental issues — you name it.”
Colorado provides a case study of the modern tensions between cities and the countryside, between the metropolis of Denver — a haven for digital start-ups and progressive movements — and sparsely inhabited regions where ranchers spend hours on horseback checking on their grazing herds. Janie VanWinkle, her husband Howard, and their son Dean own about 450 head of cattle, after selling 70 last fall in expectation of the coming drought, and 35 in June as their hay stock began to run low. They are constantly juggling between buying more feed as its price rises, and selling more cattle. While the survival of the ranch is not immediately threatened, this will be a bad year: Janie VanWinkle estimates that her cattle will weigh 100 to 120 pounds (45 to 55 kilograms) less than usual when they are sold to feedlots in the fall. To view the full position visit Fence24.