Nicky Baker has been a cattle farmer all his life. In those 73 years, he’s had his fair share of interesting winter weather experiences.
Like the first of three back-to-back bad winters in the late 1970s, when a local radio station described the incoming weather as “blizzard conditions.”
The Caldwell County farmer thought he was prepared for the snowstorm. However, what Baker didn’t know that night was that a freezing rain would put ice under the snow and freeze the sliding barn door.
“That's probably the hardest work I've ever done to try to break that door off the barn,” Baker said. “I mean, it was hours.”
Cattle farmers have been dealing with severe winter weather for generations, including the storm that hit the Bluegrass State in late January – which dropped several inches of snow across western Kentucky and set records in several communities for the coldest high temperatures observed on some days. More than 20 Kentuckians died as a result of that storm.
While some Kentucky schools and businesses shut their doors during and after the storm, farmers still had to go to work. Dealing with winter weather is a necessary part of farming in order to keep crops and livestock growing – but Baker said every winter impacts his livelihood in different ways.
“It's kind of the luck of the draw, so one year you hit the snow in the ice, and the next year it's pretty. So it's a lot of it's just a chance,” Baker said.
“Comfortable cattle are productive”: the importance of cow nutrition in winter
At the University of Kentucky Research and Education Center at Princeton, Katie VanValin is an assistant extension professor who studies beef cattle nutrition. UKREC has a farm and its own herd of cattle. All these cows give birth to calves in the fall and are producing milk to support them.
“They require a lot of calories right now to keep good body condition,” VanValin said. “When cows get too thin, we run into issues with reproduction and difficulty getting them bred back, so we really want them to stay in good condition, and this time of year is a little bit challenging, because it's the point at which their nutrient demands are the highest.”
Winter months in Kentucky tend to bring the right conditions for cows to experience cold stress – which happens when the environment doesn’t help cows keep their body temperature regulated and they have to use their own energy to stay warm.
“If they start to get a wet hair coat, any temperature under 55 degrees can cause them a bit of cold stress, and so that basically means the amount of energy that they need in their diet goes up,” VanValin said. “That can be a bit of a challenge to get enough calories in these cows when we start getting into these really cold snaps.”
This recent winter weather kept snow, ice and cold temperatures around in western Kentucky for about two weeks. VanValin said cows can handle a couple of cold days and then bounce back. But longer periods like what Kentucky just experienced mean cows – especially ones that have recently given birth – can start to lose weight quickly without a strong nutritional program.
“When we start looking at the fact that they're raising a calf, and now they're cold, and they're trying to keep their core body temperature in line, that weight can come off of them really quickly,” VanValin said.
When a cow’s condition goes down, VanValin said they’ll prioritize their calves over themselves. This might mean that cows won’t rebreed or their milk production will be limited, which can impact the calf’s health quality. Calves born during winter weather conditions can have a hard time just living.
“When it's cold and dry, they can handle that a lot better than when it's cold and wet,” VanValin said. “I think anybody would tell you, in the farming world, we'd rather everything kind of freeze over and be frozen solid versus this kind of in between and mud that we get kind of developing here in Kentucky.”
In cold and dry conditions, cows can handle 18-degree temperatures before they deal with cold stress. However, wet conditions raise that threshold to 55 degrees.
“If you think about our winters in Kentucky, we have a lot of days that are wet and 55 or below so it can it's more of a challenge than we probably realize,” VanValin said. “I think it's because we've always kind of experienced some of that.”
Cows tend to go off by themselves to have their calves, which means a farmer might not always know a calf has been born. Baker didn’t have any calves on his Fredonia farm during the coldest nights, but calves started showing up on his farm in the last three days of the cold snap. He said there’s been 10 to 12 calves born to his cattle in the last week.
“I've seen cows that are getting ready to calve. I've seen some of them go in the barn, calve, [and] take care of their calf,” Baker said. “I've seen other times, I remember it was a bad deal…. and checked them at midnight, and walked out there, and she jumped a really good fence, and it was a ridge over about 100 yards, and the next morning, the calf was laying there dead, she jumped the fence and gone out there and caved in worse conditions you can have. Some do well, some don't.”
Cold, icy and snowy weather is also hard on the producers and farmers who are maintaining the cows. People and cows deal with similar issues in enduring cold and mud. Cows can slip on ice and struggle to get up, just like people.
“If she slips and can't get back up, that's not a good scenario,” VanValin said. “We may have to get out there with a tractor to kind of help lift her up.”
Currently, Baker’s cows calve in both the fall and spring. But he’s thinking about stopping his spring calving season, which can run from about February to April. In Kentucky, those months can bring cold, snowy and icy weather – just like what hit much of the commonwealth in late January.
“The main thing is this is about the time that people start spring calving, and if they calved two weeks ago, they didn't have too much of a chance,” Baker said.
Ahead of winter weather, VanValin said there’s plenty of prep work for farmers to get their cattle herd ready for the storms. That can include making sure there’s enough feed, having a way for producers to access water sources if they freeze and laying out hay to create a barrier between the cows and the cold ground.
“Our farmers work really hard to keep these cattle comfortable,” VanValin said. “Comfortable cattle are productive cattle, and so it is in our best interest that these cattle are well taken care of.”
Cold temps help winter wheat – as long as they come at the right time
While some farmers work hard in winter weather to go out and check on their livestock, other farms are patiently waiting to see if their crop will handle the snow and ice as predicted.
Near the Logan County-Todd County line is Long Vue Farms where Jason Head is the manager of around 5,000 acres, some of which grow soft red winter wheat.
Winter wheat like the kind Head grows has to go through dormancy before the plant will flower in the spring. Head said in early March, the plant starts to grow taller and thicker after cold weather.
“Wheat’s pretty, pretty tough, pretty resilient,” Head said. “One good thing through the really cold temperatures we had was we had that layer of snow – well, here it was snow and ice – but that kind of acted like a blanket.”
Head said the snow blanket that the young wheat plants had during recent weather helped keep soil temperatures between 28 and 32 degrees, even as parts of the region registered air temperatures in the single digits.
“If the soil temperature gets into the low 20s, or lower than 20, then we could run into some issues,” Head said. “If we went through two weeks of near zero temperatures and no cover, no snow or anything covering the wheat, I probably would be concerned.”
When cold weather can be damaging is later into the spring when plants have started growing again. Cold snaps can cause major damage after the head of the wheat emerges. Farmers can check for problems while the plant is growing, but it might now show as easily in the winter as in the spring.
“If we think we've got an issue, you cut into that stem and you find the growing point,” Head said. “If it's still green and healthy looking, you're good, but if it's kind of a brownish color, looks like it's starting to kind of rot, then you know you've got problems.”
Carrie Knott is the small grains and soybean agronomist for the University of Kentucky. She said cold, snowy weather isn’t too much of a concern when winter wheat is dormant. It can become a problem, however, if that weather comes in late winter or early spring.
“From November to late February, we don't typically worry about wheat,” Knott said. “It's just kind of chugging along, or asleep or dormant, or whatever it's going to do. Where we start getting concerned is closer to that late February, early March, sometime into April, when the plants break dormancy.”
Knott said as a general rule, varieties of winter wheat break dormancy after about four days of temperature about 40 degrees, which can happen at any moment throughout the spring. A late enough freeze can kill the plant and result in empty wheat heads, which means no grain.
“The plant just kind of activates and says, ‘Okay, the winter is over. I'm going to start growing,’ and so that date is more plant developmental stage than calendar,” Knott said. “We do get concerned when we have really warm temperatures in January and February, because we know the plant will, quote, unquote, wake up, break dormancy, and will start just chugging through the growth cycle.”
Since coming out of the snow and ice, temperatures have increased significantly. Knott said the current weather means winter wheat plants are close to green up. After four days of growth conditions,damage to plants can start to be seen, but Knott said it is easier to spot around seven to 10 days of growth.
Current weather predictions from the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service show temperatures being warmer than normal for the rest of the month. However, meteorologists with the NWS Paducah office say beyond that, there’s no guarantee that winter weather is over for the region.
