DOUGLAS - Converse County rancher Brad Boner has hauled nearly all his commercial cows to Montana in search of the nearest grass.

He expects to sell off about 20 percent of his ewes this fall, and isn't sure where things will go from there.

Like many Wyoming ranchers, he has tried everything - leasing pasture, selling down herds - yet none have eased the cumulative impacts of almost six years of drought.

"If it could get any worse, I don't know how," Boner said. He's running cattle at 40 or 50 percent of historic capacity on his place.

A drought management workshop presented here Thursday afternoon by University of Wyoming's Cooperative Extension Service has helped in strategic management, he said.

Still, he's left feeling that one must guess what the future holds when it comes to moisture and temperatures in order to make good decisions. As he said, his "crystal ball is full of dishwater."

One theory presented by economist Harlan Hughes of Laramie may give ranchers new food for thought. Basing his ideas on the cattle cycle, which operates independent of drought, he said economics would suggest that ranchers would have been better off keeping their calves in 2002 and waiting until 2005 or 2006 to sell.

According to Hughes, the best drought management strategy depends on where the cattle cycle sits. In 2002, many producers sold cattle at record low prices, which, in retrospect, was a poor decision that left little to rebuild with as prices climbed in the cycle. For example, a rancher who depopulated his herd by 40 percent to dig out of the 2002 drought, when cattle prices were low, had little left of his herd when prices swung up in 2003-06.

"The cost of that hidden cost in 2002 was horrendous," he said. "The financial impact of a drought (is) in not the year of the drought, it's the years after."

Instead of "feeding" their way out of the 2002 drought, he estimates that ranchers across Wyoming depopulated their herds by 20 to 40 percent.

Unfortunately, it's hard to take a chance on the future by disregarding most recent experiences. Still, Hughes urged ranchers to consider the cattle cycle now, four years later, as it begins a decline in calf prices. Although in 2002 ranchers should have brought in feed or moved cattle to green pastures instead of selling off, it will work the opposite way in 2006, he said. Ranchers should sell now, when calf prices are at record highs, before the predicted slump over the next several years.

"I think in this drought (2006), you'd probably want to depopulate," he said. "We're at a different point in the cattle cycle. The biggest problem we'll have is that we always remember our last experience."

Hughes also urged producers to watch cattle markets in the worst drought areas, such as through the central Dakotas and in Texas and parts of Oklahoma. Prices there will affect Wyoming ranchers, he cautioned.

"The drought is not getting better," he said. In fact, it's worsening nationally, and the effects on the cattle industry will be significant.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, most of Wyoming is in a D2, or severe, drought on a scale of 0-4. Fremont County and a swath of north-central Wyoming along the Montana border have escalated to D-3, or extreme drought. The same report states that half of the nation's pasture and rangeland is in poor to very poor condition. In Wyoming, lack of rainfall has expanded the severe drought, with little new moisture predicted in the near future.