BILLINGS -- Rancher John Small figured the worst was over when the spring rains fell, and the land turned green. It looked like he'd have a nice hay crop for a second straight year. It seemed that, finally, the yearslong drought in southeast Montana had broken.

But then, he said, the rain stopped. The rangeland faded to gold. And Small's hopes for the season withered.

''I thought it would be a nice year,'' Small, who lives south of Busby, said. ''But it just went the other way.'' He now expects he'll have to buy hay to make sure his cattle have all they need this fall and winter and believes many of his neighbors will have to do the same.

Drought is taking a toll across the Plains: Wildfires in eastern Montana have destroyed hay and crop lands. Poor pasture conditions in Colorado and Wyoming have prompted producers to sell cattle or delay plans to rebuild herds. And long periods of hot, dry weather have hurt spring wheat and other crops in the region.

Dave Nickless, a federal crop insurance official in Billings, expects a large number of claims from farmers and ranchers in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota -- a state whose center falls into the exceptional drought category, the most severe designated by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Many claims have already come in.

''The old wheat plant's an amazing plant,'' said Carl Mattson, a farmer in north-central Montana who also works for the Montana Grain Growers Association. ''But there's a point where it runs out of luck.''

The U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly drought tracker, showed how quickly conditions deteriorated in Montana this past month: Drought conditions, limited in early July, had by month's end spread across the eastern half of the state, most of the northern tier and into west-central Montana. Abnormally dry conditions covered the rest of the state.

Climatologist Mark Svoboda, who helps write the drought monitor, said that while moisture earlier this year helped, drought never truly went away in southern and eastern Montana. Lack of rain the last two months and a heat wave exacerbated the situation, he said.

So far this fire season, the number of acres burned in Montana is more than double a 15-year average, according to state forester Bob Harrington. The largest fires have burned in southern and eastern Montana, and most of the acres burned -- nearly 477,000 acres, as of Thursday -- were on privately owned lands, he said.

While it's not unusual for fires to start early, ''I think what is unusual is just the number and the magnitude,'' he said.

A wildfire near mid-month destroyed hundreds of tons of hay and burned several thousand acres of rangeland on Dover Sindelar's ranch north of Billings. Fire came to within 50 feet of this home, he said.

''We were scrambling to get all the hay we could for winter,'' he said. ''Of course, all that went up in smoke.'' The smell of fire and puffs of smoke still rose from what remained of the ruined hay Saturday, over two weeks after the blaze.

Farmer Keith Schott considers himself lucky, despite spring wheat and pea crops that don't look so hot, range conditions he describes as ''hanging in there,'' and the appearance of grasshoppers at his place west of Broadview, in south-central Montana. Rain showers have fallen at his farm of-and-on all summer, he said, and he's expecting an average winter wheat crop, if not better.

''Go 20, 30 miles south and east of us, and it's a whole different story,'' Schott said of conditions. ''Drive out to our house, and you can still see green. Come closer to Billings, and you don't see any green.''

Mattson, with the grain growers association, said it's too early to predict whether spring wheat production will meet or fall short of expectations this summer. Based on July 1 conditions, the National Agricultural Statistics Service forecast production of 79.8 million bushels and an average yield of 28 bushels per acre.

He said some farmers may have to decide whether their yields justify the cost of running a combine through the fields. Cutting costs tend to run around $15 an acre to $20 an acre, and the price per bushel of wheat is a fraction of that, he said.

The high costs of producing a crop, including fuel, ''really drives expectations and needs for a crop,'' he said. ''And the drought gets really problematic when you start paying bills at the end of the year.''

On the Net:

U.S. Drought Monitor: http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/index.html