El Nino is no longer a distant probability sitting in a climate model. It is here, and by every measure meteorologists track, it is strengthening fast.

Most of the agricultural attention this will generate is predictable, and reasonable. What happens to rice, maize and pulses. Whether sowing windows hold or slip. Whether reservoirs fill enough to carry the country through the dry months ahead. Those are the right questions to ask.

There is another question that deserves an equal seat at that table, and rarely gets one: what will India’s livestock eat while all of this plays out?

The August 2026 ENSO Diagnostic Discussion from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the numbers plainly. Sea-surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific have already crossed 2.0 degrees Celsius above normal, with the Nino 1+2 region running as high as 2.9 degrees above average and subsurface anomalies reaching 10.0 degrees at depth. NOAA now assigns greater than 90 percent confidence to a very strong El Nino persisting through the Northern Hemisphere autumn and winter of 2026-27, with a 69 percent chance the event ranks among the strongest since global records began in 1950.

The World Meteorological Organization’s August update reaches a similar conclusion from its own models: a strong El Nino through August to October 2026, with above-normal temperatures across much of the world and significant shifts in regional rainfall patterns. WMO’s own caution is worth repeating here, because it applies as much to a fodder plan as to a flood plan: a forecast does not by itself prevent a hazard. What it does is give governments, businesses and farming households a window to prepare before the hazard arrives.

India’s Meteorological Department flagged the risk before the season even began. Ahead of the Southwest Monsoon’s arrival in Kerala on 4 June, three days behind schedule, IMD’s own outlook pointed to below-normal rainfall at roughly 90 percent of the long-period average, with close to a 60 percent probability of a deficient season overall. The stated reason was the same super El Nino now confirmed by NOAA and WMO.

By 21 August, the season-to-date picture had not meaningfully improved. Cumulative rainfall across the country was running 13 percent below the long-period average, with wide regional variation: only about 2 percent below normal in Central India, but as much as 26 percent below normal across the East and Northeast. Kharif sowing as of that date covered 1,056.70 lakh hectares against 1,072.77 lakh hectares in the same week last year, a gap of roughly 16 lakh hectares that has narrowed since the early weeks of the season but has not closed. Ragi sowing has fallen by more than a quarter compared with last year, rice is down over 3 percent and maize down around 4 percent, while farmers appear to be hedging toward hardier, shorter-duration crops: pulses are up 1.3 percent overall, and bajra and jowar, both more drought-tolerant, have gained ground. (Rural Voice)

Reservoirs told a similarly uneven story earlier in the season. As monsoon rains were still establishing in mid-June, India’s 166 major reservoirs stood at 28.28 percent of capacity, 15.8 percent ahead of the seasonal norm but 8.17 percent behind the same week in 2025. The stress was not evenly spread. Southern India’s reservoirs sat at 20.98 percent against 34.93 percent a year earlier, with individual reservoirs such as Karnataka’s Bhadra and Tamil Nadu’s Vaigai running at a small fraction of their normal levels. (Down To Earth)

None of this amounts to a declared drought. It does amount to a season that is behaving exactly the way a strengthening El Nino would predict it to, and doing so in real time rather than as a future risk.

It would be a mistake to read the numbers above as a settled verdict. The Indian monsoon is not governed by the Pacific alone. The Indian Ocean Dipole, a pattern of alternating warm and cool sea-surface temperatures across the eastern and western Indian Ocean, has its own independent influence on Indian rainfall, and can partially offset El Nino’s drying effect when it turns positive at the right time, as documented reviews of the two systems’ interaction have long shown. (ScienceDirect)

Forecasters currently expect a moderate-to-strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole to develop alongside this El Nino through the second half of 2026, evolving in parallel with the Pacific warming rather than independently of it. (Climate Impact Company) In years such as 1997 and 2019, a strong positive dipole helped cushion India’s monsoon against an otherwise unfavourable El Nino. That is the honest, complicating half of this story, and it is also why IMD itself lists a positive dipole among the factors that could soften the season’s second half.

The complication cuts both ways, though. WMO’s own August assessment notes that a strong El Nino arriving together with a positive dipole can just as easily amplify volatility around the Indian Ocean basin, region by region, rather than simply cancel out. The honest summary is that nobody can say with confidence today whether 2026 ends up looking more like 1997 or more like 2015-16, when a similarly powerful El Nino left India with just 86 percent of its normal monsoon rainfall and widespread agricultural drought. (Down To Earth) What is not in question is that the range of plausible outcomes this year runs from merely below-average to genuinely severe, and that is already enough uncertainty to plan around.

Scale is the reason this question deserves more attention than it usually receives. According to the last published national count, the 20th Livestock Census, India is home to more than 535 million livestock, including well over 300 million cattle and buffalo. A 21st census was launched in late 2024 and its full results are still awaited, but there is no reason to expect the underlying scale to have shrunk.

India also produced 247.87 million tonnes of milk in 2024-25, up 3.58 percent on the previous year and equal to roughly a quarter of all the milk produced on the planet. (Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying) More than 8 crore rural households depend directly on dairying for some or all of their income, a large share of them small and marginal farmers with a handful of animals rather than commercial herds. Nearly 70 percent of the workforce behind that production is female, often the same women who anchor much of rural India’s dairy economy more broadly. Dairying alone contributes an estimated 5 percent to India’s national economy. (PIB)

This is not a marginal sector waiting to be affected by climate volatility at some point in the future. It is one of the largest livelihood systems in the country, and it eats every single day regardless of what the monsoon decides to do.

The nutritional base under this enormous economy was already stretched before this El Nino formed. In a statement to the Rajya Sabha on 31 July 2024, the Union Minister for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying cited ICAR-IGFRI, Jhansi estimates putting India’s green fodder deficit at up to 32 percent and its dry fodder deficit at 23 percent. (Down To Earth)

A closer government-commissioned assessment adds an important layer of nuance to that headline number. India’s official all-India feed and fodder study found that when actual feeding is measured against the National Dairy Development Board’s own nutritional standards, the typical animal falls short by 160.4 kilograms of green fodder per day, even in scenarios where national-level supply and demand appear roughly balanced on paper. (DES, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare)

That structural shortfall is exactly what climate volatility magnifies fastest. Green fodder demands the resources that become contested first in a poor monsoon: irrigated land, standing water and predictable growing conditions. When those become scarce, farmers understandably prioritise food and commercial crops over fodder crops, and a weaker harvest also means less crop residue such as straw and stover, the other pillar of India’s dry fodder supply.

Crops and livestock face the same weather, but they do not have the same options for absorbing a bad season.

When green fodder disappears locally, farmers travel farther to source it, pay more for it, lean harder on dry fodder and concentrate, or simply reduce the ration. At exactly the same time, higher temperatures place animals under heat stress, which independently reduces feed intake and milk yield even where feed itself is available. The two pressures rarely arrive one at a time.

The economics behind this are unforgiving. Multiple ICAR-linked assessments put feed at 65 to 70 percent of a dairy animal’s total cost of production. A shock to fodder availability is therefore not a peripheral expense working its way through a farm budget. It strikes directly at the single largest line item in that budget. (DES)

India does not need to guess at what a strong El Nino does to its fodder economy. The 2015-16 super El Nino left the country with just 86 percent of normal monsoon rainfall and a widely documented agricultural drought. (Down To Earth) Even without a repeat of that scale, the early symptoms of stress are already visible in this cycle. Reporting from Maharashtra has documented dairy farmers selling off large parts of their herds as fodder costs, which had nearly tripled in some regions over two years, became impossible to sustain, with one farmer in Ahmednagar district selling more than 120 animals in a single year to keep the rest of his herd fed. (Devex)

Separate analysis this year has traced the same pressure into dairy inflation, with Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh flagged as the states most exposed to erratic rainfall feeding through into feed costs and, from there, into milk prices that carry real weight in India’s consumer price index. (Down To Earth)

The downstream effects follow a familiar and largely preventable sequence: falling milk yield, deteriorating body condition, disrupted fertility, heavier dependence on purchased feed, and thinner margins for the farmer at the end of the chain. None of this is abstract to the household living it. For a smallholder with two or three animals, a bad fodder season is not a line item, it is the difference between a stable monthly income and a forced sale of the one asset that generates daily cash.

This is also why livestock deserves a far larger place in India’s climate-adaptation conversation than it currently occupies. A cow or buffalo functions as a daily cash-generating asset for millions of rural families precisely because crop income arrives only seasonally. When that daily asset is compromised, the household loses its most reliable buffer against exactly the kind of shock a bad monsoon represents.

Silage, improved forage varieties, better pasture management and community fodder banks all have a genuine role to play, and none of them should be set aside in favour of a single alternative. But climate volatility of the kind this El Nino is bringing forces a more fundamental question underneath all of them: can at least part of India’s fresh livestock nutrition supply be decoupled from weather altogether?

Answering that means treating fodder less like another rain-fed crop and more like infrastructure, something that can be produced locally, predictably and on a fixed daily schedule regardless of what the sky is doing. It is the same logic behind a broader shift toward comparing feed options on reliability, not just on price, and it is the specific problem Shunya Agritech has built its production model around.

Through distributed, controlled-production centres and on-farm systems, Shunya produces NAF, Nutri Ankurit Feed, fresh sprouted livestock nutrition grown vertically on a fraction of the land and water that conventional green fodder cultivation requires. The economics of that model, including how unit costs actually compare with traditional fodder, matter most in exactly the seasons when conventional supply becomes scarce and expensive. Production OS standardises the biological protocols and quality checks across these distributed facilities, while tools such as Feed Right and Herd Intel help farmers and partners see, ration by ration and animal by animal, where nutrition is falling short before it shows up as a drop in the milk can.

Systems like these are not a replacement for India’s vast conventional fodder ecosystem, and nobody building them should pretend otherwise. What they can offer is something increasingly valuable in a year like this one: a dependable layer of fresh nutrition that keeps producing when land, water and weather stop cooperating. The same fodder-scarcity and smallholder-dairy dynamics that make this an urgent problem for India recur across much of the Global South, from East Africa to Southeast Asia, which is one reason a model proven here has relevance well beyond India’s borders.

Nobody can say today with certainty how this El Nino will resolve for India. The positive Indian Ocean Dipole developing alongside it gives real reason for cautious optimism, and IMD’s own outlook leaves room for the second half of the season to outperform its first. But an 8 crore-household economy that already runs a double-digit fodder deficit in a normal year cannot afford to treat a very strong El Nino as someone else’s problem, or as a risk worth addressing only after the rain has already failed.

The questions worth asking now are practical ones: where is fodder stock lowest heading into the dry months, which herds are most exposed to a further price spike, and which parts of the daily ration can be made independent of whatever the monsoon decides to do next. Getting ahead of those questions, rather than answering them after the fact, is what separates a hard season from a genuine crisis.