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April showers bring May flowers. And April showers help pastures, hayland and the crops of farmers who actually are able to get in the fields in early spring. But here's another thing: April showers bring calves with respiratory and intestinal problems in May. It doesn't rhyme, but it's pretty true.

We've had a lot of rain lately, but you wouldn't know it if you watched the news coming out of our closest city. There, it's all talk about drought and how we need even more rain and how lucky we are for the rain. I can tell my husband feels lucky when he comes in from checking cows soaked through three layers of clothing.

My home in central North Dakota is not in a drought and is not considered abnormally dry — at least not right now. However, most of North Dakota is either , as is most of my home state of Montana (strangely not including the area around my home county of Yellowstone, where it often seems desert-like), most of Minnesota and all of South Dakota.

That means we're pretty well surrounded by people who do want it to rain and who are enjoying seeing the liquid level rise in the rain gauge. Certainly, all of the people who last fall and this spring are happy to have the rain.

I very much enjoyed a recent piece by James Rogers, forage crops production specialist for North Dakota State University Extension. . He looked at North Dakota data from 2014-24 to see how often the state entered D2 — or severe — drought, which can trigger various federal emergency responses and also is the level at which crops, pasture and range losses would be expected to occur.

"Of the 572 weeks in the time period, 269 were reported at a drought intensity level of D2. That was 47% of that timeframe! It ranged from zero weeks in 2014 to all 52 weeks in 2021," he wrote.

That's been sticking with me. We are in severe drought conditions here almost as often as we aren't. That also means we're probably in at least moderate drought or abnormally dry conditions more often than not.

We can't prevent the drought, Rogers wrote, but we can plan for it. He wrote about how to utilize forage as well as possible with strategies like pushing livestock to unused portions of pasture with temporary fencing. I'm thinking planting varieties of crops that do well in dry conditions would count there, too. And experts as ways to keep land resilient in a drought. Since we're dry as often as not, these should be the practices we always follow.

In a perfect world, we'd get the perfect amount of rain at the perfect time and end up perfectly average. But that never happens. We're too wet sometimes and too dry sometimes — and sometimes they're in the same season. If we get timely precipitation, we might be technically abnormally dry or even in drought, but we might not even worry much. Conversely, rains that aren't timely or are excessive don't always do a lot of good, but we might end up looking like we have average precipitation, even if we were dry when it mattered.

While we very much wish it would stop raining here until we can get the calves to some drier ground — and maybe even until my poor daughter's softball team can get some games in — we know we, like everyone else in the region, are never far from a drought. We'll never get it when we want it all of the time, so we just have to take it when it comes.