Many Farmers, Ranchers Struggling to Hold on Through Drought

Aug 09, 2022

By Zippy Duvall

Mother Nature can be a tough business partner. Storms can come in an instant, undoing months—or even years—of hard work and planning. But it’s not just the sudden, sweeping natural disasters that are devastating. Sometimes Mother Nature is slow and unforgiving. This is something our friends out West know all too well as they face another year of intense drought—a drought that is dragging on and edging eastward.

Nearly 70% of the U.S. is facing abnormally dry conditions, or worse, according to the latest reports. For some areas, folks are praying for summer rain, while others will do their best to hold on in hopes of more snowfall this winter. But a heartbreaking number are facing tough decisions already, from selling off herds to plowing under withered crops. The American Farm Bureau recently surveyed members from 15 states across the West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Midwest to assess on-the-ground impact. It’s clear from the responses that many farmers and ranchers are struggling to hang on as water sources continue to deplete.

Less water means less agricultural production from a region that produces a sizable share of our food supply. Through careful stewardship and hard work, farmers and ranchers across areas facing persistent, severe drought produce more than 80% of fruits, nuts and vegetables, more than 80% of wheat, more than 50% of dairy, and more than 70% of beef for our nation. The impact of the drought could place added strains on the supply chain and overall economy as American jobs and food security depend on this region.

According to our survey, most farmers in the regions impacted expect water allocations to be cut in half, which means crops and livestock production will be down significantly as well. Farmers and ranchers are making cuts on top of cuts from last year. Among ranchers who already reduced their herds in 2021, half will be selling off more this year to get by. Crops are down too, with 37% of farmers surveyed saying they had to plow under crops because of a lack of water—that’s up from 24% of farmers last year.

It's a bleak picture in the heat of a very dry summer, but farmers are not without hope. I met with Farm Bureau leaders across the West just last week and heard stories of the challenges and tough decisions Western farmers and ranchers are facing. There is no doubt that folks are hurting, but they also are committed to hanging on as long as they can.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids