Business booms for family that brings water to drought-ravaged pastures

As the drought-ravaged summer pushes some ranchers toward the grim prospect of selling off herds, a pair of Manitobans are offering ways to pump water for cattle to those parched pastures — and business is booming.

Fraser and Mark Schram, a father-and-son duo, run separate companies, both selling products that deliver the life-giving liquid to cattle in a way that helps producers manage the health of their animals and their pastures.

"An awful lot of farmers are catching on," said Fraser, the elder of the pair and owner of Northfork Ranch Supply, an agricultural supply store in Cartwright, near the U.S. border in southwestern Manitoba.

One product getting a lot of attention is the pasture pipeline system, which draws water from a well and can distribute it a couple of kilometres away in various different directions — all below the surface.

"It's below where most people would be digging up the ground and keeps the water nice and cool," said Mark, who runs the Schram Cattle Company and installs the systems.

By the start of June, he installed more kilometres of pipe than he'd done in all of 2020 — the first year after he took over that part of the company from his dad.

By the time this year is done, Mark will have installed more than twice as many kilometres of pipe than Fraser ever did in a single year, the elder Schram said.

And that's not even Mark's full-time job. It's a side gig to his own cattle operation.

He started getting calls to install new systems or expand existing ones in the spring when calving was happening. In a year like this, Mark knew he had to answer those pleas.

"When you need water, you need water. So I was kind of doing the ones that people absolutely needed," he said, adding he has spent time on his own ranch but plans to install a lot more pipe in the next few weeks.

Some producers are being proactive and getting the infrastructure in place in anticipation of a future with more droughts, Mark said.

"We're not looking at a couple of good rains to bring this water level back. This is a new kind of reality for us here," he said.

"Drought cycles happen pretty regularly but what we're seeing is it amplified with an extra two or three degrees of heat [as the climate changes], and it just makes it that much more brutal."

There are barren sloughs and dugouts this year that didn't go dry during the 1930s dust bowl, Mark said.

"It's beyond anything we've seen in the last 100 years."

Cattle need water but there are pastures with dried-up creeks. In other cases, there might be a creek nearby, but the pastures are bare because they've been overused.

Some desperate producers are selling their herds for half of what the cows are worth, Fraser said.

"It's a horrible situation."

The Schrams install underground pipes with a plow that both carves out a channel and feeds the pipe into it. A surface line can be connected at any point or multiple points along the pipe to bring drinking water for the cattle to a trough at the surface.

The system can usually be installed and operating the same day and is easy to expand.

Mark has a spiderweb of lines running from his home near Cartwright and out for a couple of kilometres in different directions.

The Schrams also sell a solar- or wind-powered pumping system that sits on a boat trailer and can be moved to water sources such as creeks or ponds, if there isn't a nearby well or other water source.

The pumps can push the water through lines to as far as a kilometre from the source.

"It's a little more involved than just plugging into a well but it gives you a lot more freedom to bring water to the cattle basically wherever you want," Mark said.

It also protects animal health, said Fraser, who's sold the units for 25 years and says the supplier is having trouble this year keeping them in stock.

If a rancher has a dugout with low water, the unit can be used to pump it directly into a trough. That keeps cattle from wandering into the muddy pit, urinating in the water, stirring up sediment and risking hoof rot from cuts that get infected.

Without a pipeline or a solar/wind pump, the only other option is to truck water to the cattle every few days, but you don't do that very long before you're pretty exhausted, Mark said.

Federal funding to aid drought-stricken farmers — covering about half the cost of projects like the pipeline — has helped drive the demand for the systems, the Schrams said.

"As tough as it is this year … it's setting people up for success over the long term," Mark said. 

"If you can figure out how to manage through this, we're going to be that much stronger coming out the other side."