India’s southwest monsoon closed its books on 30 September with rainfall about 13 percent below the long-period average, the weakest season since 2015 and the thirteenth-lowest since 1901, according to the India Meteorological Department. June alone fell 35 percent short. The national figure hides a sharper regional story: the southern peninsula ended 24 percent below normal, and by early October IIT Gandhinagar’s India Drought Monitor showed 70.6 percent of the country’s area under dry or drought conditions.

Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have formally declared drought across most of their rain-fed districts. Telangana and Rajasthan are assessing losses. The public conversation, understandably, has focused on wilted soybean, cotton and maize. But for the tens of millions of households that keep a few cows, buffaloes, goats or sheep, the crop failure is only the first act. The second act, the one that plays out in cattle sheds and fodder markets over the next eight to ten months, is often more expensive and much slower to recover from.

This post sets out what the 2026 drought means for livestock, using the official declarations, field reporting from the affected districts and published research on how droughts move through rural livestock economies, in India and across the Global South.

The declarations have come early and kept growing. Karnataka declared 101 taluks in late August, expanded the list to 217 by 2 October and to 226 of its 240 taluks by 15 October, after a monsoon that ended roughly 30 to 35 percent below normal by different counts. Maharashtra notified 265 talukas on 25 September and added 39 more on 14 October, taking the total to 304. Andhra Pradesh declared 388 mandals across 21 districts on 2 October, after June to August rainfall came in at 197.6 mm against a normal of 424.3 mm, a shortfall of 53.4 percent.

Sources: IMD via Business Standard; Down To Earth monsoon report card; Down To Earth, Maharashtra; state government notifications as reported.

Two features of this season matter for livestock. First, the deficit was concentrated in the rain-fed, semi-arid belts where livestock carry the most weight in household income, because crops there are already unreliable. Second, the dry spells were long. Officials in Marathwada describe a gap of about 45 days without meaningful rain during the growing season, and long gaps damage fodder crops and pasture regrowth even where the season total looks only moderately short.

A crop either makes it to harvest or it does not. Animals have to be fed and watered every single day until the next good rain, which in most of peninsular India means June 2027 at the earliest. That makes the livestock impact of drought cumulative rather than one-off, and it moves through the feed chain in a predictable sequence.

Green fodder fails first. Rain-fed sorghum, maize and grasses grown for fodder wither in the same dry spells that hit food crops, and village grazing land dries out within weeks. Dry fodder follows. Straw and stover are by-products of grain crops, so a poor kharif harvest means a smaller pile of residue to carry animals through the winter and summer. As reporting from Bundelkhand has documented, low rainfall cuts wheat and paddy straw output and pushes up its price. Concentrates get dearer. Maize and soybean, two of the crops hit hardest in Maharashtra, are also the backbone of compound cattle feed. Wholesale food inflation rose to 8.66 percent in September, and feed ingredients do not sit outside that trend. Water becomes a daily logistics problem. Ponds and shallow wells go first, then borewells. Groundwater in Marathwada has already fallen by more than three metres, according to the state government.

The forecast does not help. IMD expects El Niño to peak in November and to weaken only from March, with October rainfall below 85 percent of normal and the October to December season below normal across most of the country. That puts the rabi season, and the straw it produces, at risk as well.

The reports coming out of the affected districts in the first half of October are consistent, and they show the feed chain breaking in real time.

In Adgaon village near Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, a dairy cluster that normally sends 4,000 to 5,000 litres of milk a day into the city, supply has fallen by about half. One farmer told ETV Bharat that he used to sell 25 to 30 litres a day and can now barely sell 15. Cows that farmers bought for Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1.5 lakh would not fetch even Rs 75,000 today, a local farmer leader said, because nobody is buying.

In Dharwad district of north Karnataka, sellers outnumber buyers at the Nulvi cattle market. Siasat reported that animals worth about Rs 1 lakh in a normal year were sometimes being offered Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000. Farmers there are asking for fodder banks and goshalas to be opened so they are not forced to sell at all.

In Palnadu district of Andhra Pradesh, fodder costs have roughly tripled, according to field reports summarised by eDairy News. The Macherla mandal alone holds more than 101,000 cattle and buffaloes. Chilling centres and bulk milk coolers report lower intake, and the milk that does arrive carries lower fat and solids-not-fat, which lowers the price per litre the farmer receives. Herders have started moving animals toward the Nagarjuna Sagar Right Canal months earlier than usual, some as far as Tenali. Contract rearing fees of about Rs 600 per animal per month have become unaffordable, and some milch buffaloes are heading to slaughterhouses at distress prices.

None of this is new. When the Swaraj Abhiyan surveyed 108 villages across seven drought-hit districts of Uttar Pradesh in 2015, it found that 77 percent of cattle-owning households had cut feed, 88 percent reported lower milk yields, 27 percent had let animals loose and 40 percent had made distress sales. In Chitrakoot, one of the worst-affected districts of Bundelkhand, the cattle and buffalo population fell by about 19 percent between the 2019 Livestock Census and 2024-25, according to Mongabay-India. Repeated droughts do not just thin a herd for a season. They can shrink it for good.

Development economists have long described livestock as the rural household’s savings account: an asset you build in good years and draw down in bad ones. The idea is sound in theory. In a covariate shock like a drought, when every household in a district faces the same problem at the same time, it works far less well than people assume.

The 2026 market data from Marathwada and Dharwad are a textbook example of that mechanism. A household that sells a Rs 1 lakh cow for Rs 75,000, or far less, loses the difference on the day of sale. It then loses the daily milk income that cow would have produced, and later, the calf. Rebuilding a productive dairy animal takes years: a replacement heifer has to be raised to breeding age, carried through pregnancy and brought into milk, or bought back at post-drought prices that rise sharply once rains return and every household tries to restock.

Research on Indian livestock keepers confirms that farmers know this and try to hold on. A study of 240 livestock-dependent households in three drought-prone districts of Bihar, by Goswami and colleagues at ICAR-NDRI, recorded 49 distinct adaptation strategies. The most common were feeding extra crop residue, storing straw, feeding and milking during cooler hours and keeping animals in shade. Selling animals and reducing herd size were on the list, but as a later step. Larger herd size was the strongest predictor of how many coping strategies a household adopted, which suggests that the smallest, poorest keepers have the fewest options.

Official drought assessment in India is built around crops: rainfall indicators, vegetation indices, sown area and crop-cutting experiments. Livestock deaths may be counted where they occur. The larger losses, which are productive rather than mortal, mostly go unmeasured.

Milk quantity and quality. Underfed animals produce less milk, and that milk carries lower fat and SNF. Because cooperatives and private dairies pay on fat and SNF, the farmer loses twice on every litre. Fertility. Cows in poor body condition come into heat late or not at all, and the calving interval stretches. A drought in 2026 therefore depresses milk output in 2027 and 2028, long after the rains return. Heat on top of hunger. Drought years are hot years. A 2026 study in Scientific Reports by Yadav and colleagues, using district data from Haryana between 2004 and 2019, found that heat waves, the temperature-humidity index and potential evapotranspiration in May and June had significant negative effects on crossbred cattle yields. Peninsular India is heading into its own hot season with depleted fodder and water. Water itself. When the Palvan cattle camp in Beed sheltered about 5,000 animals during the 2016 drought, it needed roughly 3 lakh litres of water a day, or about 60 litres per animal, delivered by 25 tankers at Rs 1,500 each, as PARI documented.

According to the National Statistical Office’s Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households for 2018-19, farming of animals accounted for about 15 percent of the average agricultural household’s income nationally, and a considerably higher share for marginal and landless households, for whom milk is the most regular cash income they have. In semi-arid districts where crops fail one year in three, the cow or buffalo is what keeps school fees and loan repayments on schedule.

The work of keeping animals alive through a drought also falls unevenly. Women carry most of the daily labour in Indian dairying, around 70 percent by NDDB estimates, and in a fodder crisis that labour grows: longer walks for grass and water, more time spent chopping residue, more anxiety about each animal’s condition. The loss is economic, but it is also measured in hours and health.

At the national level, India produced 247.87 million tonnes of milk in 2024-25, according to the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying’s Basic Animal Husbandry Statistics. Rajasthan alone accounts for 14.82 percent of national output and Maharashtra for 6.71 percent. Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are major milk states in their own right with large cooperative networks. A sustained fall in milk procurement across these states will show up in dairy balance sheets and, eventually, in milk prices for consumers well beyond the drought districts.

What is unfolding in Marathwada, north Karnataka and Rayalaseema is a regional instance of a pattern seen across the drylands of Asia and Africa. During the 2020 to 2023 drought in the Horn of Africa, UN OCHA estimated that around 9.5 million livestock died across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, wiping out the main asset of pastoralist families. During the 2023-24 El Niño, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe declared national drought disasters, and the SADC regional appeal reported livestock deaths across the region as water and fodder ran out, alongside widespread distress sales of animals and other productive assets.

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2023 assessment of disaster impacts on agriculture puts global agricultural losses from disasters at about USD 3.8 trillion between 1991 and 2021, including an estimated 16 million tonnes of meat, dairy and eggs lost every year, roughly the annual output of these products in Mexico or India. It identifies extreme temperatures and droughts as the hazards with the largest impact per event. Asia carries the largest absolute share of losses.

The common thread is that rain-fed fodder is the weakest link in smallholder livestock systems everywhere. Countries that treat feed security as part of food security, with year-round fodder production, reserves and water-efficient systems, recover faster. Those that treat it as a relief item to be trucked in after the crisis, pay more and recover slower.

India has a well-developed drought relief toolkit, and some of it works. Maharashtra’s 12-point relief package includes fodder arrangements for livestock, drinking water by tanker, loan restructuring and an advance of Rs 5,000 per affected farmer before Diwali. The Union government has directed states to stock fodder, source it from surplus regions and act against hoarding. Cattle camps have kept millions of animals alive in past droughts; in 2012-13, about a million animals were in camps across Marathwada and western Maharashtra, and in 2016 the state paid camp operators Rs 63 per large animal per day.

But relief is, by design, reactive and expensive. The table below sets out the difference between managing a drought and building out of one.

At Shunya, we start from a simple observation: fodder scarcity in India is largely a design problem, not a destiny. Rain-fed fodder will always be vulnerable in a drought year. The question is whether a district also has a source of nutrition that does not depend on the rain.

Water-efficient green fodder. Hydroponic fodder grows from seed to feed in about a week, in a controlled environment, on a fraction of the water and land of field fodder. A peer-reviewed trial at Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University measured water use of about 1.53 litres per kilogram of fresh hydroponic maize fodder (Jemimah et al., 2020). We have set out the full economics in our analysis of hydroponic fodder unit cost in India and a comparative analysis of livestock feed options. Hydroponic fodder is not a full ration on its own, and we say so plainly. It is a reliable green component that keeps rumen function, milk yield and body condition steadier when field fodder disappears.

Local production, local ownership. Our Production Partner programme places fodder production units with rural entrepreneurs, many of them young people, who sell to dairy farmers in their own catchment. In a drought, that matters: feed is produced within the district instead of being trucked across states, and the margin stays in the local economy. The infrastructure behind these units is built to run with limited grid power and water.

Stretching scarce feed further. When every kilogram counts, ration balance becomes critical. Feed Right helps farmers combine what they have, residue, limited green fodder, concentrate and mineral mixture, into rations that protect milk and fertility rather than simply filling the stomach. Herd Intel gives farmers, cooperatives and administrators animal-level records of yield, health and breeding, so that relief can be targeted at the animals and households that need it most.

The worst months for livestock in the affected states are still ahead: the stored residue from a weak kharif will run down through winter, and summer 2027 will arrive before the next monsoon. Five steps would reduce the damage.

1. Count the fodder, not just the crops. District administrations should publish fodder availability and requirement estimates alongside crop-loss assessments, so that shortfalls are visible before they become distress sales.
2. Move residue from surplus to deficit regions. Odisha ended the monsoon 30 percent above normal and Uttar Pradesh 8 percent above. Much of the paddy straw that Punjab and Haryana struggle to manage every October and November could feed animals in Marathwada and north Karnataka instead of being burned, if transport and baling were organised at scale.
3. Open fodder banks before cattle markets crash further. Subsidised fodder depots and goshalas, as farmers in Dharwad and Palnadu are requesting, cost less than rebuilding herds after mass distress sales.
4. Protect breeding and milch animals first. Prioritise mineral mixture, balanced rations and veterinary support for pregnant and lactating animals, so the drought does not extend into the next two calving seasons.
5. Fund local fodder production as drought infrastructure. Treat decentralised, water-efficient fodder units the way we treat check dams and farm ponds: as long-term resilience assets, eligible for the same programmes that finance water conservation.

Droughts in India are usually declared, assessed and closed through the lens of crops. That lens misses the asset that most rural households rely on to get through the bad years. The 2026 drought will be remembered for its crop losses. Whether it is also remembered for a collapse in herd sizes and milk incomes in the semi-arid districts depends on decisions taken in the next few months.

The real test of drought response is not only how many animals survive until the rains return. It is how many are still producing milk, still calving and still earning for the families that keep them, a year from now. That is a standard worth setting for India, and for every country in the Global South where the herd is the household’s safety net.