Well, I’m not sure if any of you have followed my Twitter account the last few days or have seen anything on CNN. But in case you missed it I was stuck in a blizzard two and a half days. The little part of Michigan I’m from got hit hard. I’m talking snow drifts taller than me (I’m 5′ 8″), roads completely closed down (which never happens in Michigan), and 15 inches of snow in 48 hours.
Outside the kitchen window at my house. We don't normally get this much snow this early.
As great as snow is (debatable in my opinion but I will play along) it causes a few issues on farms. Since my family doesn’t have a large enough storage tank on the farm our milk gets picked up every day. When bad weather comes, that screws the system up in a major way. Normally our milkman comes with his big semi-truck at 3 am. On the first morning of the blizzard we didn’t see him until 7:30 am! That meant our milking shift was over 2 hours behind.
On top of milking being behind when you have 40 to 50 mph winds and 15 inches of snow you have a mess. Let me show you.
There were about 4 inches of snow in this part of the barn.
As hard as we try to make barns winter proof, when you have this kind of weather we can’t do much. Parts of our barn had about 4 inches of snow covering it. Luckily, cows don’t mind the cold so much. Our biggest duty is to monitor them closely during very severe weather to make sure they don’t get sick. We also make sure they have more than enough to eat because in the winter we have to make sure the cows are eating enough calories to keep warm and stay healthy.
If we do this, even these girls will be happy and healthy.
These are some of our heifers that have an outside feeding area.
The snow is fun, but too bad our work doubles during winter. There’s nothing like cold toes, frozen waterers and cleaning snow out of barns!
