Louisiana ranchers cope with herd losses from Isaac’s floods

In August, the ranchlands spreading over the boot of Louisiana were dotted with hundreds of cows and calves grazing on a smorgasbord of tall marsh grasses. But Hurricane Isaac took all that away, turning some of the best cattle country on the Mississippi River delta into brackish, foul-smelling floodwater stretching for miles. A lot of the livestock raised here—by just a handful of ranching families—drowned in Isaac’s storm surge along with birds, snakes and other wildlife. The storm overwhelmed weak levees protecting this farm country south of New Orleans. “It’s heartbreaking,” says Charmion Delesdermier Cosse, a third-generation rancher with about 300 mother cows in Citrus Lands. “This year was probably the best calf crop we’ve seen in a long time.” South Louisiana’s cattle industry consists mostly of pockets of ranchers along the coast sandwiched between the Mississippi and Texas borders. Almost all of them raise calves to be sold to others to be fattened for market. But Isaac dealt a blow to the ranching trade, which already had diminished over the years as Louisiana became an oil patch center. Officials estimate more than 400 head of cattle drowned in Isaac, though a final count is pending. Read the complete feature here.