Everyone Wants to be a Farmer
…Until it’s -17 and nothing on the farm works and there are 2 ft drifts all around the farm!
Last weekend was a real introduction to winter here at the farm. Fun fact, but did you know that diesel fuel will gel up in extremely cold temps? Usually when sub-zero temps are coming we make sure that all the trucks and tractors are filled up with anti-gel and additives to help keep them running… However, it was so cold last week that it didn’t even matter. The equipment and trucks all gelled up and we were fairly stranded most of the week. Another fun fact is that electric fence wire gets brittle in this cold and can snap too. Part of the problem was the amount of snow that we had gotten before the cold snap… we weren’t able to get as many hay bales placed out in the pasture as we needed so feeding the cattle was our biggest concern. Surprisingly, the cattle do pretty well in the cold as well… they know to hunker down and a lot of survival instinct kicks in. We have winter waterers that usually stay de-iced all winter… in this extreme cold like last week the waterers can’t always keep up so the cattle adapt by eating snow for hydration. So, we had a couple really long, cold days digging paths out to the cattle and repairing fence lines in the cold. Such is farming.
As bad as last week was though, it wasn’t the worst winter storm we’ve experienced at Alden Hills.
A few years ago, when we had -30 I think it was the worst I ever experienced. The tractors all gelled then as well, and we couldn’t get hay out to the herd either. At one point I was laying underneath the tractor with Emily’s hair blower trying to un-gel the fuel lines and filter but it was too cold for even that to work. It was pretty comical because the only vehicle that worked for those couple days was my gasoline Toyota 4Runner…. I was loading the back of it up with hay and plowing through the drifts in the field to get out to the cows. It wasn’t pretty but it kept the cows fed and that’s all that matters sometimes!
Terry from Highfield blames me for the cold weather (I will take the blame; it does snow every time I complain that we don’t have any snow) so I might tone it down for a few weeks. End of the story is, it’s back up to the 30s already, the equipment is all running as it should be and we’re slowly thawing out over here.