This year we travelled to Iowa for the holidays. You might have heard already that they got some snow. We got three white christmases worth of snow or about 25" not counting the freezing rain that also fell. I had my fingers crossed the whole time that we wouldn't lose power. Thankfully we didn't, but it flickered really badly when the wind came up. Auntie and Uncle did lose power, and then their generator went out. They had several really miserable days in a row. We did put Christmas off til the Sunday after, and that worked out well.
This time of year is hard on the cows as well as the farmers. They had to shovel out all the feed bunks before they could feed the cattle. Imagine if you had to shovel 300-400 feet of sidewalk every morning by hand. That's what they have to do. After they get all that done, they then have to check all the water and make sure it's open so the cattle can drink. This is all assuming that the tractor will start in the first place. You also have to plow the driveways while your doing all of this too. I really feel for everyone who works outdoors this time of year. All that snow is pretty to look at, but the temperatures are so hard on people.
Oh, been there done that!! I miss the cattle, but do not miss chores in miserable weather. Or power outages. Sure, you go out in the terrible weather and crank up the tractor generator, but it's still a lot of work. And a tractor generator could never run ALL the things on our farm, we had to rotate what we were doing. Milking. Cooling the milk. Heating the house. (Luckily--I had a nice kerosene heater for those moments--the house never got cold!) Pumping water to tanks. Yes, I don't miss that part but miss seeing new calves born. Cows contendedly chewing their cud. The sheep being--well, dumb sheep!
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