Water and grass drives ranching business

A month into irrigation season, ranchers are starting to move their cattle around to take advantage of greener fields where herds will find more forage.

Carson Valley has long been considered the garden spot of Nevada, and growing hay is one of local agriculture’s biggest products.

According to the 1918 report from the East and West Fork water commissioners there were 29,197 acres being irrigated in the Valley.

That number has climbed a bit over the years, with the amount of irrigated land in the county at 31,754 acres in the 2022 Census of Agriculture.

That’s down from 34,683 acres in 2017, demonstrating a continued reduction in irrigated land in the Valley, which was estimated at 37,000 acres in 2010.

There is no significant storage upstream from Carson Valley, so all the water used to irrigate those fields comes from the East and West Forks of the Carson River, which depends entirely on the snowpack.

Thanks to a significant amount of precipitation since the beginning of the year, it’s likely irrigators will have sufficient water this season, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service water supply outlook.

That picture has improved thanks to the May 4 storm that provided a little bump to the snow-water equivalent to 126 percent at Carson Pass, located at the top of the West Fork, as of Thursday. The snow water at Ebbetts Pass at the top of the East Fork was at 104 percent on Thursday.

The Carson Water Subconservancy District will provide an update on the 30-year Carson River Watershed Regional Drought & Water Sustainability Plan to Douglas County planning commissioners 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Douglas County Courthouse in Minden.

Agriculture is a business, and that’s the focus for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s five-year census report.

The federal government has been conducting some sort of agricultural census since 1840 and every five years since 1925, according to Census.gov.

Douglas County’s share of total agricultural sales is down from 4 percent of Nevada’s total to just 2 percent, despite a slight increase in the number of farms.

According to the report, 71 percent of the county’s agricultural sales come from livestock, poultry and projects, which is down from 2017.

The number of cattle and calves was down from 17,023 in 2017 to 13,072 on Dec. 31, 2022. That’s still quite a few more than the 9,485 cows listed in the 2012 Census. Douglas’ cattle raising ranking in the state dropped from fifth in 2017 to eighth of the 16 Nevada counties included in the survey.

The Douglas County profile listed $22.5 million in products sold in 2022, compared to $23.5 million in 2017. The percentage of family farms did jump from 90 to 95 percent during the five years. The amount in hay and other forage actually went up during the five years from 17,537 acres to 18,023.

One of the most concerning statistics is the substantial decline in the net cash per farm average income from $18,655 in 2017 to $7,066 in 2022. Net cash farm income for the entire county was $1.738 million, down from $4.45 million in 2017.

Most of the material in the update is from 2022 and could have changed in the last 17 months.