Hoping for rain is not a strategy when feeding livestock following a late break or in a drought, according to Animal Health and Nutrition (AHN) consultant and vet Dr Jillian Kelly.
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She said farmers facing feed deficits in west Victoria due to this year's late autumn break needed to start to make a plan and prepare for the months ahead.
Based at Coonamble, New South Wales, Dr Kelly mentored small groups of farmers throughout the 2018-2020 drought and now taught her learnings to farm communities across Australia.
She was speaking to Stock & Land at the recent Better Beef conference in Ballarat.
"I would do the sums," she said.
"I'd sit down and work out what commodities you have available and what sort of a mixture you can make that's going to optimise rumen performance and the health of the animal.
"Droughts can be really tough mentally but having a plan tends to give you a little more security.
"You forecast what it's going to cost, what's going to be involved and there's a lot of security in that."
Dr Kelly emphasised the importance of focusing on rumen health in a drought or feed deficit.
She told producers that they needed to work to continue to return the rumen to its 'happy place' and only then, would livestock thrive or be maintained.
"I would consider what's happening in the rumen," she said.
She said cattle and their rumens needed energy, fibre, protein, minerals and vitamins to remain in shape and functioning.
"Get a feed test and know how to interpret it," she said, warning that feeding straw or hay alone sometimes was not sufficient.
She said farmers could buy two loads of hay which were identical in appearance but could have vastly different nutrient values.
She said good fibre in the diet created heat production in the rumen, kept its papillae healthy and prevented acidosis.
Two much fibre, or solely fibre in the diet, created acidosis, she said.
Dr Kelly said farmers needed to seek help on feed budgeting and planning, earlier rather than later.
"Not everyone is good at that and especially if you're not from a drought prone area and don't feed all the time, you're not going to have the skills," she said.
"There's lots of wonderful people with great skills.
"Find someone and utilise the resources available to get some quality advice."
She said for some farmers, this required a "mindset change".
"Just keep an open mind and seek advice," she said.
"Most farmers do know how to feed within the parameters of what they've always done.
"But as a drought progresses and it goes on for longer and longer, you might run out of barley and you might have to find another commodity or you get priced out of the corn market.
"If it goes on, it will evolve so part of handling that is thinking about what is your next step."
She said farmers needed to embed "trigger points" in their programs, where if feed was reduced to a certain level, they'd move to offload certain stock categories or wean calves, for example.
Dr Kelly also urged producers to protect land during dry periods and confine stock where possible.
She said this would enable a faster recovery from prolonged dry periods and grass to re-establish more quickly.
She said waiting for rain was just not an option, given Australia's changing climate.
"That was certainly something that plagued my producers up in north-west NSW," she said.
"We thought 'it can't go on for more than 12 months, surely it's going to rain' but it didn't."
She said if producers just hoped for rain, by the time it continued to not come, they were left with no plan and no feed.
Dr Kelly said "climate change is a real thing".
"Our climates are becoming a lot more variable," she said.
"[Drought] is something that we could start to see as part of normal practice."
