The next 36 hours will be the test. We went down before 6 this morning and checked all of the water storage and water tanks. It's already hot, but quite bearable. The flies were unreal on the cows. I've never seen them like that. One group was bunched up by a gate almost begging for help. I had some fly spray in spray bottles with me, and we walked around amongst the cows in three different pastures, spraying anyone that let us get close enough. The largest herd was somewhere up in the woods, so we let them be. When this is over I will bring them in and give them all a good pour-on.
Ky Hills,
Our calves are almost all born in cold rains and it doesn't seem to bother them much. In 2019 we had a historic extremely wet snow that accumulated to about 2 feet, right in the middle of February calving. We couldn't get out to them. All we could do was plow a path down to that pasture and feed hay to the cows that came out of the hills. I fully expected we would lose multiple calves, but we only lost one. They were smart and had their calves up in the forest, tucked in under the fir tree branches, where they were protected from wind and the snow stuck to the branches leaving a shelter below. We lost hundreds of trees to that heavy snow load, but fortunately none crashed down on a cow or calf.