Snow Days at the Farm!
Wow! Even though I follow weather forecasts extremely closely and knew the snow was coming for days before and even though I watched it come down with my own eyes, I’m still a little in disbelief that it even happened!
It sounds like most people didn’t have too many pipe or other issues and we’re just able to enjoy the wonder of it!
Of course having a farm to prepare and livestock to worry about does take a little of the magic out of it, but we certainly have it much easier than our produce growing farmer friends.
Our main prep work before the first temperature drop on Sunday night was to make sure we had back up water for all the animals, mainly the chickens. The goat, cattle and pig troughs are big enough that even when we turn the main farm water off and can’t fill it for a day, they usually still have enough.
The chickens have smaller troughs on a float valve, so I filled IBC totes with water just outside their fences in order to be able to smash the ice and bucket them water during the freeze.
They certainly don’t drink as much as in the warmer weather, but they do still need water when it’s cold!
Cade and I went out in the peak of the snow to check on everyone and knock snow off the hoop houses. The pigs were romping around and honestly seeming to enjoy it. The cattle were unfazed with a layer of snow on their backs. We had moved them to a wooded section for a windbreak.
An interesting fact I learned years ago from friends who farm in cold, snowy climates is that snow on an animal’s back is actually a good sign -- it means they are insulated and have internal warmth, typically. The pigs’ insulation is a thick layer of fat, whereas the cattle and the goats rely on their fur and thicker winter coats.
Ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep, deer, etc.) also create warmth internally by eating more, especially fibrous stuff like hay — their digestion process is like an internal furnace.
And chickens rely on their feathers mainly, which is why they molt and grew new feathers in the fall to be prepared for winter.
During the most blustery part of the storm, the goats and all three chicken flocks had perfectly aligned themselves in the windbreak from either their coop of in the goats’ case, their fresh round bale in the hoop house.
All told, everyone made out fine! Up here at the farm (closer to the arctic front and farther from the Gulf moisture) we actually only got about 4-5 inches of snow, compared to double that on the Southshore!
So it melted fairly quickly on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Patches remained in the shade and with the weekend temperatures and now today’s rain, it’s all gone, almost as if it never happened at all!
Another interesting fact Grant taught me on Tuesday is that snow can trap atmospheric nitrogen and therefore is sometimes called "poor man's fertilizer." It’s looking like our rye grass and some daikon radishes and purple top turnips we seeded as a deer plot and livestock forage all survived the snow and cold and are taking off with a little boost of nitrogen form the the snow!
The feeder pigs have been making their way around all the wooded sections of the farm. We’re about to move them by trailer to another section that we can’t really access just through adjacent moves.
And right before the snow we moved the breeder set to the next section in the field by our house for cogon grass eradication! They’re doing a great job rooting up all the tubers and spreading out more hay and organic matter helps other things take root and compete with the cogon.
There’s also some piles of brush and saplings and small trees we moved to make the pad for our house foundation and they’re having fun digging in those, too!
Ending with my two bottle kids and these ridiculous photos I snapped of us before the storm. The second one is sort of like an album cover, right? And since they are daughters of Nutmeg and Cinnamon I think our band should be called Kate & the Spice Girls! ;-)