Katie Baltzor rides her side-by-side among the black angus cattle she raises close to her house outside of Hines, Oregon.

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HARNEY COUNTY, ORE. – Late bloomin’ rabbitbrush – wads of swaying ochre – stud the roadsides and steep eroded-basalt buttes rising up from the basin ground outside of Hines, Oregon.

In a broad open area, horses munch standing hay as Katie Baltzor watches her black angus cattle on this fall day.

We’ve ridden out here in a side-by-side automobile – it’s like an overgrown golf cart with a pickup mattress in the back made for tough ranch work.

All the animals are quiet. Happy. With their heads down grazing.

“You see that horse, how he’s got speckled colors?” said Baltzor with a smile in her voice. “Looks like country gravy, I guess that’s why they called him Gravy.”

Diesel costs stay close to report highs, despite current actions by President Trump as the mid-term elections get nearer.

The excessive costs are including to ache for cattle ranchers in western states, who were already struggling with persistent drought. And in Harney County, where bovines outnumber the individuals – by a lot – there’s many mouths to feed.

Sir Yukon Gold, or just Yukon – like the potato – is a 10-year-old palomino Quarterhorse gelding. He’s grazing with the other Baltzor geldings in a area south of Hines, Oregon.

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‘Everything has gone up’

“Fuel costs, parts costs, everything has gone up,” Baltzor said. “People say that prices have gone up, but calf prices (paid to ranchers) have (too).

“But calf costs still have not stored up with inflation – and so that’s what makes it powerful for ranchers to maintain in enterprise. If everything else goes up and cattle costs do not, you’re just spinning your wheels a bit – you higher like what you do.”

Baltzor’s face shows a life spent working in the desert sun. Her long ponytail glints a bit reddish in the afternoon light.

Baltzor and her husband Keith, had just finished riding a bunch of about 150 hundred head of their cattle down Highway 205 on horseback from another pasture.

“Sometimes it is dicey,” she said. “There were vehicles beginning to come through our bunch of cows … sadly a girl opened up her door and jumped out. And these cows would not go close to her. It scared them, they wished to come back anyway. Then she got out again and still was stopped. People just do not perceive, they do not know. When you see a herd of cows and they’re coming towards you, do not cease, just maintain coming through them.”

Baltzor was shifting the cattle so they could work them nearer to house. They are going preg-check the mom cows to make positive they’re carrying new infants, and give all the cattle and calves vaccinations and dewormer.

Dramatic steep eroded-basalt buttes rise up from outside Crane, Oregon. Drought has closely impacted Oregon with low snowpack and little rain that means little irrigation water, and fueling huge wildfires this 12 months.

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Wildfires introduced them house

But for Baltzor, this 12 months is already addin’ up powerful. The locations where Baltzor usually ranges her cattle in the mountains were ravaged by record-size wildfires this summer time, robbing them of the grass the herds often eat. Baltzor, and employed riders, had to hoof it through heavy smoke into the mountains to extract their cattle from the path of the fires.

“So all our cows, instead of coming home the second week of September, we had to bring them home the third week in July,” Baltzor said. “Other folks had to do the same. And some people had to start feeding – we didn’t, we had the rakebrunch.”

Rakebunching means just raking pasture hay into piles, and leaving it in the area for animals.

Now, it’s gonna take time ’til the mountain grass comes back. In some areas where her neighbors’ floor has been burned over, it’s taken years for them to be ready to return their animals to graze, Baltzor said.

“Where are we gonna run cows?” she said. “Some of those fields that burned, the allotments you can’t go back on them for a couple of years. And because so many acres burned in Harney County, it’s not just my husband and myself that have this issue.”

With no grass, ranchers want hay to feed their cattle. But the drought that set the stage for the fires has dried up Baltzor’s hay meadows, too.

“So, the meadows were very short,” Baltzor said. “Some of them got some water and you were able to cut a little bit. Some of them didn’t even get water and you couldn’t even cut some of the fields.”

A spherical bale of hay sits ready to be collected close to New Princeton, Oregon.

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Rakebunch

Here’s where the excessive diesel costs add up powerful – what little hay there is, is a lot more costly to harvest.

“The tractors, you know everything is diesel, and it’s expensive and it costs a lot to keep them running,” she said.

Haying usually takes several passes with a tractor – you have to reduce it, flip the windrows to solar dry, and then bale them and stack them. Each time they fill the tractor with diesel now, it’s about $300.

“And so just like this year when we were trying to decide, ‘Should we try to run and bale some of this hay? Or it’s not very good, it’s very light, should we just rakebunch it?” she said. “Part of that was looking at the cost of diesel.”

Rakebunching means going over it fewer occasions with the tractor. They also rakebunched because they feared more wildfire would pressure them back to their homeplace with the drought. Rakebunching is a good answer for the late summer time and fall, but it will go away them brief of hay later.

“But the bigger problem becomes next year,” Baltzor said. “If we don’t get the precipitation, then we don’t have the irrigation water and then we’d be looking at purchasing hay.”

Purchasing hay can imply driving lengthy distances to get it, or having it delivered, in massive vans that burn a lot of diesel.

Baltzor drives her side-by-side through grass the colour of a flaxen palomino.

Allen Farnsworth leans in for a nearer look at some cattle at the public sale in Vale, Oregon. This 12 months’s calves are penned and weighed after being bought at public sale

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‘You maintain a heifer’

This 12 months’s excessive diesel costs come at a time when the value of beef in the grocery store is also method up. Ranchers can promote their calves now for fairly good cash. But, “It’s not something you just do,” Baltzor said. “You keep a heifer.”

Heifers are younger females, ranchers like to maintain some or all of the ones born every 12 months, so they can produce more calves, and change cows that are too previous for that. It’s a long run funding.

“It’s two years [for a heifer to be bred and] before you have a calf,” she said. “You know, a product. It’s not that they’re going to have a calf right away. And sometimes people don’t understand that.”

Auctioneer Phil Roe auctions off a group of cattle to consumers in Vale, Oregon.

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Break level and winter

Baltzor said she and her husband and ranch companion have switched to fuel pickups to attempt to save a little on diesel. But she said every ranch here has a totally different break level

“Do you have vehicle loans?” Baltzor said. “Do you have cow loans? Do you have land loans?”

Baltzor said she and her husband labored outside jobs for years to be ready to construct their herd and accumulate land.

“It will pencil for us,” Baltzor said. “Because we’re lucky we worked really hard not to have debt. But not everyone’s that lucky. And when we first started out we had a lot of debt …. Nobody gave it to us. We had to find places to rent, and we had to buy cattle. And we had to take out loans to do all of that.”

On the method out of the pasture, a steel gate squawks a lot as it’s closed and then clanks shut, held quick by a rope.

“There’s different ways to get into the cattle business, and ours wasn’t the easiest way,” Baltzor said. “But I think it’s very worthwhile. Because you appreciate what you have.”

But occasions are lean for many in southeast Oregon, and now – here comes winter.