Southern Montana is on drought alert as temperatures trend above 90 degrees and the rivers draw down.
Communities from Big Timber to Miles City were included in a 14-county drought alert area identified this week by the Governor’s Drought and Water Supply Advisory Committee. Water supply and soil moisture reports from state and federal agencies prompted the move.
“I was putting in fence posts and I fought that thing all the way down,” said Eric Sommer of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. There’s no measurable moisture in the statistician’s Lewis and Clark County property. “Two feet into the ground, it didn’t even turn dark.”
In parts of the Montana, the dryland hay harvest is down 30 to 50 percent of normal, Sommer said. Because wheat prices are so low and the cost of hay is rising, some farmers have reported baling their wheat for animal feed.
South Central Montana farmers near Billings and Hardin have been cutting wheat for about week. Winter wheat conditions seem good, but with drought conditions emerging, farmers report concern about the spring wheat crop which won’t be ready for a few weeks.
Fire danger is high. The Department of Natural Resources and Conservation tapped severity funding this month and positioned fire and helicopter crews across southcentral and southeastern Montana expecting extreme fire conditions as July wears on.
The U.S. Drought Monitor lists portions of 12 Montana counties with moderate drought conditions and one county in severe drought. Included in the list are Big Horn, Carbon, Carter, Flathead, Glacier, Lake, Lewis and Clark, Missoula, Sanders, Stillwater, Sweetgrass, Teton and Yellowstone counties.
Current Drought Monitor mapping is markedly better than they were at this time last year, when half the counties in the state were in drought condition and northwest Montana was a tinderbox.
However there’s an undertone of drought that isn’t showing up in the monitor, said Ada Montague, drought coordinator for the Governor’s Drought Advisory Committee. A few timely rain and hail events across the state kept Montana drought conditions just below the surface for the first two weeks of July, Montague said.
Snowcams at Big Sky Ski Resort and Bridger Bowl were showing white landscapes around the first week in July. Hail near Glendive piled like spring snow. Those conditions did not make up for an extremely dry June, the driest recorded in 82 years in Yellowstone County.
“We left the month of June with pretty bad conditions and then we got some pockets of rainfall that influenced the precipitation input for the U.S. Drought Monitor,” Montague said.
But for the second year in a row, snow left the mountains early and consequently river flows are declining rapidly. The Yellowstone River gauge at Billings is the reporting flows normally not seen until August. River flows are slightly more than half of what they were a week ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In southwestern Montana, fishing has been canceled on portions of the Gallatin, Jefferson and Madison rivers.
Source - billingsgazette.com
