TY - JOUR T1 - How much grass will grow on your rangelands this year? Grass-Cast sheds light on the question! JF - Journal of Soil and Water Conservation SP - 53A LP - 55A DO - 10.2489/jswc.2022.0607A VL - 77 IS - 4 AU - Julie Elliott Y1 - 2022/07/01 UR - http://www.jswconline.org/content/77/4/53A.abstract N2 - “How much grass will there be this summer?” This is a question that ranchers, wildlife biologists, range managers, and owners all ponder, particularly when moisture has been less than expected. On the semiarid plains of the United States, where production in a drought year can easily be less than half of average, the answer is not easy. Grass growth is a complex process that hinges on getting the right amount of moisture at the right time. Weather forecasting is challenging, especially for rainfall, so no one knows for sure how much moisture will come until the growing season is over. In the meantime, if signs of drought start to emerge, cattle markets fall, hay markets rise, and rangelands can be damaged in ways that can last for years, or even decades, if we wait too long to reduce livestock forage demand in the hopes that grass will grow. This delayed action has negative effects on the rangeland, as well as the animals, livelihoods, and culture of the people living there.Grass-Cast was developed to help forecast what grass production might be in the coming growing season. Available online at https://grasscast.unl.edu/, the Grassland Productivity Forecast, or GrassCast for short, is a model that uses soil water holding capacity, plant community, and past weather information to create a current soil water profile. It then takes future temperature and precipitation scenarios to simulate evapotranspiration (ET), available soil water, and resulting plant growth (expressed in pounds per acre near the end of the growing season relative to the long-term average for that local area). The model was developed in 2017 by a large team of research and outreach partners, including … ER -