From the Barns: Care in the cold

We got our annual dose of bad winter weather and it has just now left us, as the warmup finally has gotten here and the snowpack has finally all but melted away. We got a good amount of snow for southern Illinois and at the same time the temperatures stayed below freezing, much of the time in single digits overnight and in the mornings.

We encountered the usual problems, such as water lines freezing or hard to get in and out of some places. For the most part, those problems maybe weren’t as troublesome as they could have been. The feed truck was able to navigate every place it needed to go and that is always a big relief, delivering the feed which is the most important thing in addition to the water. It is enough to get the basic tasks accomplished, but it seems like it takes twice as long to get them done in conditions like we were dealing with.

The toughest issues were equipment related, water freezing in the loader and fuel gelling in the feed truck. Both those took time to thaw out and resulted in delays in feeding on the days that happened. Twice, the same tire on the wheel loader went flat and came off the rim. That resulted in a call for someone to come out and take the tire for repair and remounting, so it was essentially down for two days. That forced us to use the skid steer for feed loading which slows things way down.

Maybe the worst was one morning the feed truck wouldn’t start on a Saturday and after a lot of effort we were diagnosing that the starter had went out. Took a chance and sent Wyatt on a two-hour round trip to pick up a new one while we tried to remove the old one, which was no easy task, especially laying under the truck in the open shed with the wind chill recording minus-2 degrees. Thankfully that was the problem, and the new starter worked immediately, but again feeding after a several-hour delay. Enough complaining, but so it is with this love-hate relationship with taking care of cattle.

It seemed like the rest of the past month was just doing the basics, as it is not a good time to start new or big projects. The other day, Brett and David spent a good amount of time doing some clipping, followed by professional picture taking of a dozen bulls and a few heifers for those pictures to go into the sale catalog, for our first annual production sale scheduled in April. With this being our initial go-round for something like this, there is a lot to learn and a lot of preparation to take place, starting now and over the next couple of months. I am excited, yet nervous, not knowing what to expect in this venture.

Got a few calves just hitting the ground, but the majority is going to start in about 30 days, but with the way time flies, that’s just around the corner. Hope we got the bad weather out of the way. Sure don’t want to be calving in those kind of conditions. They are forecasting warm temps this upcoming week, but it is still February, so anything can happen.