To help farmers and ranchers proactively plan for drought instead of waiting until it’s happening, the Colorado State University Extension and other partners came together and created a program.
Five years ago, the Colorado Agricultural Drought Advisors program was created.
It grew out of conversations that Retta Bruegger, the CSU Extension Western Region Rangeland Specialist, had with a Palisade farmer.
“The problem they first discussed was how stressful drought is and how farmers and ranchers feel like they can’t control much,” said Emily Lockard, Montezuma County’s director and agriculture specialist at the CSU Extension.
Then, they “started thinking of how we could give a framework to help producers consider what they can control during drought,” said Lockard.
When the program started in 2020, there were successive dry, warm winters that year and into 2021, plus a dry summer monsoon in 2020.
It was so dry, in fact, that precipitation totals for the 20 months between January 2020 and August 2021 were “the lowest on record since at least 1895 over the U.S. Southwest,” according to the NOAA Drought Task Force Report.
Fast-forward to 2025: It’s no secret that winter has been dry.
Though there’s still time left for more snow and hopes for a wet spring, “Snowpack is looking bad for this area of the state,” Bruegger said at the 2025 Southwestern Colorado Beef Cattle Symposium on Jan. 23.
As of Feb. 6, the Upper San Juan Basin has 59% of its median snow-water equivalent, and the Lower San Juan is at 18% of its median, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“What can you be thinking about doing to be proactive, instead of waiting?” said Bruegger.
And while “spring precipitation is important,” nobody can control what might happen.
As one farmer has said to Bruegger, “You don’t want to manage based on a 20% chance of rain on Friday.”
That’s where drought plans come in.
It’s targeted at producers, of course, since “agriculture is impacted first and hardest by drought,” said Bruegger.
“And hoping for rain is not a drought strategy,” she said. “I advocate for a written plan. It reduces stress.”
That written plan need not be “some big thing.” It can be as simple as one or two pages.
Bruegger broke a drought plan down into four, digestible parts.
First, assess.
Make an inventory of what you have, remember how drought has impacted you in the past, and consider what you’re already doing in preparation for droughts.
Second, plan.
In this phase, producers are encouraged to set goals, brainstorm strategies and set trigger points.
Trigger points are an important consideration, she said, since that’s the “point at which monitoring information prompts a decision.” It’s an “if, then” sort of approach.
“It’s difficult to make decisions like selling cattle or fallowing fields when it’s already dry and you’re feeling really stressed,” Lockard said. “It can be helpful to consider trigger points of when you will make a decision before you need to make it.”
The fourth and final step of the plan is to learn and adapt.
Simply, evaluate your plan and make changes to it accordingly.
Lockard said that in the five years the program has been around, 38 producers have created successful drought plans.
Another “940 producers and ag and natural resource professionals have participated in Drought Advisors’ Drought Leadership Training and drought-related webinars,” said Lockard.
Drought planning with the Colorado Agricultural Drought Advisors is free. There’s a drought planning handbook on their website, www.droughtadvisors.org, “but that might be daunting to review alone,” said Lockard.
“Farmers and ranchers are experts in their operations, but sometimes all of us could use a thinking partner when faced with difficult issues,” the Drought Advisors website reads.
Reach out to Lockard at Emily.Lockard@colostate.edu if you’re interested in creating a personalized, producer-led drought plan.
