....this has to be the best quote of our long and miserable winter, and I have heard it from so many different people. DEFRA would be horrified at the mess farmers have made in Kansas this winter, knee deep combine ruts filled with water and melting snow, pastures rutted and "poached" as you say in Britain. While winters here typically have some bad stretches, this has been one for the record books as we have lacked a rather common feature of our Kansas winters, a scattering of 5-10 day periods where it warms up and is nice.
The quote above refers to the way we typically feed cattle, with a 3/4 or 1 ton pickup truck with a "cake" feeder and bale bed. Normally you can get out in the morning when the ground is frozen, but we have had several fairly long stretches where the ground did not freeze at night, or barely froze, so the gates were a rutted mess. Therefore, each time you head in or out of the gate you tried to take a slightly different angle. Eventually, you run out of angles to approach.
Our roads are another matter. Unlike most places I saw in Britain, our country roads are all gravel, if you are lucky, a few are dirt. Weather like this makes the gravel "disappear". I have had to engage the four wheel drive on my pickup just to get down the public road. Our township man has hauled 115 semi loads(about 27 tons each) of gravel onto the roads since January 21st. As a board member I have been impressed I have not been publicly flogged, everyone seems to understand we just have to live with the situation.
Of course, there are the "getting stuck" incidents. I have been stuck twice this winter, pretty good I would say, once in a snow drift on the road, another time feeding cows with the pickup. I have ridden to the rescue of a stuck neighbor once, when his tractor and feedwagon were caught crossways in frozen ruts about 2 feet deep.
How about frozen bale rings? Do you get those in the UK? At 2 or 3 degrees F a bale ring will stick pretty tightly to the ground, a nudge from a tractor and loader can do one of two things, dislodge it, or ruin it, a couple of mine have required a little stick welding this winter. I might have posted this before somewhere else, but my heat lamp went out in the well house one night, lucky me I got to replace my water system.
Of course it hasn't just been farmers who have been inconvenienced by the cold. Our local oil producers have had a devil of a time getting to their wells, and with all sorts of freeze ups. The freezing and thawing ground tends to make lines break more often, and their lease roads are even worse than the public roads to negotiate. Business owners have spent quite a bit of money getting snow removed from parking lots, and all of us have higher gas and electric bills than usual, thanks to day after day of cold weather, starting back in November.
However, a glimmer of hope is on the horizon. Last week we had two nice days, and today was quite nice. Fertilizer buggies are going full tilt now topdressing brome and what little wheat got planted, and unbelievably we are about a month away from trying to plant the 2010 corn crop. In about 3 weeks the horizon will fill with smoke and the prairie will turn black from fire, as we try it all again for another year. Who knows what 2010 will bring, it is hard to believe it could be more challenging than 2009 was, but you just never know.