Pre and Post Hurricane Francine at the Farm
After the most beautiful cold front weekend last weekend, we really didn’t want to shift gears to prepare for a hurricane last week, but what can you do? The only way out is through, isn’t it?
We did the things we’ve always done for storm and high wind threats, like strap down the mobile chicken coops. Because we take in all of Cool Brew’s coffee grounds, we have plenty of spare super sacks sitting around, waiting to be spread or poured into our compost piles for our soil blends.
Each tote of coffee grounds weighs about one ton, so we place three on each side of each coop and then strap down with ratchet straps. This way we don’t risk the entire coop flipping over and bending the axel or something else not repairable.
We also did things we learned to do after Ida, including filling lots of extra IBC totes with water to fill the various animals troughs. The summer that Ida hit was already incredibly wet, so it uprooted lots of trees around the farm by the root ball (rather than snapping their trunks). Therefore our rural water system had many water line breaks and it took several days to get water back on.
We knew with the recent droughts that this was likely not to happen with Francine, but we weren’t taking any chances!
Other prep including moving the goats and cattle to the center of the farm in case electricity went out and the fences weren’t hot. We have backup solar and battery operated energizers to use if it were an extended outage, but we wouldn’t be setting those up in the middle of the storm!
We also like to get the herds away from tree lines so they don’t have any trees or branches fall on them. The main other step was preventatively taking down some dead trees and branches. Grant cut a bunch of willows around the barn and my parents’ camper as well as several trees and branches near the hoophouses.
And thankfully, all the prep paid off and we had no major damage or issues. We got about 8.25 inches of rain on Wednesday, nearly 5 inches of it as the main band passed over us from 9 pm to 1 am or so. We did lose power with the winds on the back end of the storm, around 2 am. But the Washington St Tammany Electric Coop had us back on by 9 am on Thursday.
There were a few trees down on the fences, but Grant had his chainsaw serviced and prepped beforehand and he did far less post-storm chainsaw work than expected. And that’s the benefit of the high tensile fence we use, it has some give in it and then you can just tighten it back after removing the tree versus replacing whole sections of damaged field fence.
The goats were clearly mad about how much rain we got and how wet they were, but the cattle seemed to enjoy the cool shower and gorged on a fresh pasture we moved them to.
One coop did have some bent metal roofing that we still need to fix, but none of the coops moved or flipped and that was the goal.
We moved Flock 2 up to the next grid yesterday and dumped all the coffee grounds out into a low spot. They went right to work scratching through the coffee grounds for beetles and fly larvae!
And yesterday we sold another breeding group of yearling goats — one buck and three does — to another farm to start their goat herd. I’ve already gotten video of them zooming around their new pastures. I wish I could keep every single goat but since I can’t, it’s great to have them go off and start new herds nearby.
We did some pig moving after the storm, too, and we’re looking forward for the heat to break in the next couple of weeks for a lovely fall on the farm.