Governor lays out plans as drought continues

Aug. 08--MOTT -- It isn't clear how much North Dakota will be able to rely on help from a cash-strapped federal government to assist with the ongoing drought crisis, which poses financial and fire risk the longer it persists.

Though most of Monday night's town hall meeting in Mott focused on public reaction to weather modification, discussion did turn to address the road map for how the state is going to deal with the drought if it continues unabated.

"This afternoon I did sign a request to President Trump to declare North Dakota a drought disaster," Gov. Doug Burgum said to a packed room at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Mott. "If you can get declared a federal disaster area it can trigger additional federal program help. Under the new ag program...they said that there's going to be no such thing as a presidential drought disaster. We're giving it a shot anyway, we're going to shake that tree and see if something comes out of it."

The small grains season is "shot", Burgum said, and a lot of focus is turning towards livestock and helping people survive winter with their livestock.

"There is cross-state support going on, we've gotten suggestions made about possible sources of feed," He added. "We've got to get livestock to food or food to livestock. That's the basic math for maintaining herds."

By the third year of a drought, Burgum said everyone is "collectively thin" and that drives prices up even higher.

"Anything we can do from the governor's office, from my office, we'll be doing," Doug Goehring, commissioner of agriculture for North Dakota, said. "The sorry thing is...there aren't disaster programs anymore. Although we can ask for them, don't hold your breath. If anyone watched what happened in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado this year, 11 lives were lost. Tens of thousands of head of cattle lay there burnt. Nothing happened. The federal government doesn't have the money."

On the other hand, Goehring did say that there had been "great response" from the current Secretary of Agriculture, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue.

"It took some urging...but they are doing as much as they can with the resources that are currently available," Goehring said. "Secretary Perdue was great about it. If anybody wants to doubt his commitment to agriculture, the fact that he opened up...all those contracts that had restrictions on grazing...that opened up 500,000 acres. He opened those up. He's going to get sued for it...and he did it anyways. Hats off to him."

Those 500,000 acres are part of the Conservation Reserve Program, which is a land conservation program administered by the Farm Service Agency and run through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These lands are environmentally sensitive lands that have been removed from agricultural production for the purposes of environmental health. These lands have been opened up to allow for grazing and accumulating hay and feed.

"There's 1.5 million CRP acres in North Dakota. The Secretary opened up almost all of them," Goehring said. "So there'd be 750,000 acres roughly that should be available for haying and grazing. There's only 400,000 that's actually spoken for."

He said that the contract holder, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is the one who decides how that land is distributed. CRP lands are not a cure-all either, as one public comment pointed out: there's no fences nor water for grazing.

"Yeah, that's one of the reasons why we talked about the emergency livestock water program," Goehring said. "If it's possible to build a pipeline up to the edge of CRP land...but it still comes down to you have to put a wire around it. Does that mean you put up another three-strand barbed wire fence, and then guard that fence until your cows are trained not to run through it? Unfortunately, that's the problem."

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