Feed, outside help in short supply for ranchers

• By PATRICK COURREGES
• Acadiana bureau
• Published: Dec 1, 2005

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ESTHER -- Cattle and horse owners in the water-swept and salt-burnt southern side of Vermilion Parish say that while their pasture lands are still muddy, help and hope have been drying up quickly.

Brenda Hebert, who spent 15 years building her horse farm in Esther -- and seven hours during Hurricane Rita trapped on a tractor watching much of her work wash away before a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter pulled her out -- is doing what she can to connect the help that can be found with the small family cattle and horse operations that need it.

Most of the area for miles to either side of her land were swept under several feet of salt water in the storm surge from Rita on Sept. 24.

Much of the pastures cattle and horse owners count on to feed their animals through the winter is under several inches of black mud, leaving the animals nothing to eat.

In other areas, the dead vegetation is burnt gray and useless, with spring at least three or more months away.

Hebert, working with Joelle Rupert of Vermilion Animal Aid, is using her barn and a rented 18-wheeler trailer to help keep the animals of the parish -- cattle, horses and small pets -- fed.

"If we don't stick together, we're not going to make it," Hebert said. "We've lost so much, it makes you want to hang on to what you did save. You want to say it didn't beat me, I beat it."

She said cattle and horse owners from the area she's trying to cover -- Mouton Cove to Pecan Island -- come constantly for whatever feed they can get to help their animals make it through until the fields can again provide food.

Andrew Granger, a Vermilion Parish county agent with the LSU Agricultural Center, said that about 60,000 acres of pasture land were damaged by salt water, and much of the hay cattle and horse owners had stocked for the winter was washed away or ruined.

That, he says, is the biggest issue for Vermilion cattle farmers now -- the lack of hay, from which the larger animals need the roughage to survive.

Granger said parish cattle and horse farmers need about 30,000 large bales of hay to get through the winter and they need it now.

Granger said many cattle owners, unable to come up with a second round of money to re-stock for the same winter, have had to sell much of their stock.

He said they have had to do so at almost the worst time they could have.