Yup. The forbs are deteriorating and breaking off as you state. We have not yet seen plain devastation but we are seeing so many trees die that I wonder what will be left if this persists.
Strangely, south of 290 and back to the south of I-10 but east of the Colorado River here in Texas people cut hay up to 5 times this last summer so there are pockets that are just a little odd.
In Oklahoma we got one cut in the spring. Some tried to cut late fall before frost but it wasn’t worth the diesel. South Central Oklahoma near McAlester but north of Durant made a good second cutting but that was all I saw. The Ouchitas are dry as toast. I saw a guy trying to drill winger pasture in McCurtain County and I don’t think he was much more than scratching the ground. Everybody is trying to drill something in and you can’t find a 10 to 12 foot pasture or no-till drill anywhere around. They sell in less than a week if someone has one.
We tried to plant some rye in 2007 in October. Got a little mist the night after we planted it and no more moisture until spring. Needless to say, nothing came up. We got flooding rains last fall and spring. We have a spring that was reliable back in the 20s and 30s. I cleaned it out with the trackhoe to 10’ deep a couple of years ago. The ground was downright saturated and I felt luck to get out of the area. Now the spring is dry to the bottom. It has been unseasonal for a long time.
I don’t know what to tell you and hope that you get through it. I’m on very high elevation dry land, and the drought will take even the extremely short, tough perennials up here before next summer without the usual spraying ice. Was going to start yaks next spring (even started the slightly higher fencing for those), but holding off is probably a better way to go for now. Only a little over 12 inches of precipitation per year during wetter years (thus, yaks for year-round ranching).
A couple more years to go before the probable effects of solar max during extra fluctuations (north magnetic pole still off near Russia, last I looked—can cause unusual storms but temporary desertification, too) maybe caused by an extended minimum (also includes fluctuation toward warm and dry, sometimes). If we’re blessed, we’ll see increasingly colder but wetter weather after that—maybe in 3 years or so.
Dry land cattle business is shut down from the plains to the higher large mountain basins (seasonal at high elevations, cattle moved to lower elevations during winter). If adequate precipitation (snow pack on peaks, spring snows, etc.) doesn’t happen by May, some wet land operations will start shutting down, too.