Consider what the lack of rainfall throughout the previous year has wrought on the county’s multimillion dollar wine grape growing and cattle ranching industries – a big financial hit, the size of which won’t be known until next year.

Eric Lauritzen, Monterey County’s agriculture commissioner, says assessing the financial impact of both last year’s freeze and the drought on wine grape growers “is very difficult.” Because most vineyards irrigate by drip, for example, vines aren’t necessarily dying due to lack of moisture, but the drought causes growers to juggle manmade and natural resources. “Trying to put an economic value on it, the direct, measurable impact is very difficult to assess,” Lauritzen says. “It’s more a matter of the use of resources, the increased costs involved in pumping water.”

If you don’t drink wine, and if you don’t consume beef, here is why you should care anyway: If it doesn’t start raining this winter – fast and with some regularity – we could start paying for it at the grocery stores.

According to the California Department of Water Resources, defining drought is a function of the impact of dry conditions on water users. “One dry year,” according to the department’s website, “does not constitute a drought for most California water users.”

“If we don’t get good rain this year, a mouthful of green grass for a cow in Monterey County could become a distant memory.”

Water Year 2006, for example, was the fifth wettest on record for Northern California. But past experiences show that impacts from a single dry year impact those most dependent on annual rainfall – and for Monterey County, this dry year has directly affected the $20 million cattle industry.

This fall, Monterey County was declared a natural disaster area due to lack of rainfall and loss of native pasturelands – by most estimates, ranchers in northern Monterey County now have lost 55 percent of the grasses on which their cattle feed, while in south county, it’s between 85 percent and 90 percent, depending on who you ask.

“If we don’t get good rain this year, a mouthful of green grass for a cow in Monterey County could become a distant memory,” says Butch Lindley, former Monterey County Supervisor, a self-described hobbyist cattle rancher and founding partner of Lockwood Vineyards.

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture instituted what’s called the Livestock Compensation Program, under which ranchers can receive money based on a calculation on their cattle’s feed needs and amount of pasture they graze. The money is compensation for the drought-related loss of their pastures. A low-interest emergency loan program also was started when the disaster was declared on Aug. 20, but ranchers tend only to apply for the loan programs in times of mass, widespread disaster such as floods, says Vivian Soffa, executive director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency for Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties.

“The [compensation] program is running and people are starting to apply, but it’s way too early to be talking numbers,” Soffa says. “In a normal year when the program is initiated, we’ll get 100 applications and we estimate that’s what we’ll get this year.”

Ranchers are trying to perservere, but many have had to downsize. “The majority will hang on and hope they can get early grass from the rains,” she says.

For ranchers, raising cattle has become something of a juggling act: supplemental feeding, moving cattle around (and even out of state) to where grass is more plentiful, and paying more than $200 a ton for hay, which is in short supply this year because most of it is grown in the San Joaquin Valley. This means Monterey County ranchers are competing with San Joaquin dairy farmers to purchase it.

At the Peach Tree and Topo ranches in south Monterey County, ranch manager Bill Whitney says they’ve had to sell off about 30 percent of their 15,000-cattle herd.

In the ranching business since he was 16, the now 53-year-old Whitney says 2007 is the worst year he can remember since 1976, the beginning of two years of drought.

“I think we’re starting to worry pretty good right now about what the weather’s going to do. In 30 days, if we don’t get substantial rainfall it’s going to get pretty critical,” says Whitney, who also owns the Powderhorn Cattle Co. ranching operation. “What cattle are left here are going to have to be sold. And if this year turns out to be very dry, you’ll see water rationing and it will get serious not only for the ranches, but for the cities and everyone.

“There are many ranchers who have had to liquidate most of their herds, or move their cattle out of state to Arizona,” Whitney says. “Most everyone likes to keep their cows at home because trucking them is expensive.”