WHAT A WINTER !
Instead of a lot of water going under the bridge around here it should be a lot of snow piled up . Man did we have a SOB of a winter . 2022 saw a drought of large magnitude hit us . In 2021 it was dry , but we made it through it with timely rains . Not so for 2022 as it got really dry along with a late frost that had a major impact on our grass and hay . On a normal year we would put up between 1000-1500 round bales of hay but in 2022 we put up less than 300 . It was quite an expensive year with prices for hay running from $ 170 - $ 250 per ton and feed grain was also high . We were anticipating drought , so we aggressively sold cows and liquidated about 20 % of the herd last spring which helped us get through the summer and be able to make it through to fall without having to ship cows in the summer at lower prices . We also sold down cattle that we usually had run on grass to put on weight before sending them to the feed yard . We made it to December by the skin of our teeth when we were able to trail cows to corn stalks . We ’ d been there about 2 weeks when the first blizzard hit and dumped 16 inches of snow and high winds and bitter temperatures . We had to move the cows out of the fields with limited protection to fields that were close to the canyons where the cows had protection from the wind and had access to grass that they could graze since the corn stalks were all snowed under . The storms kept coming about every 2 weeks . We would get 14- 16 inches of snow and strong winds . When the grazing was gone in the canyons , we couldn ’ t trail the cows home due to too much snow . We had to haul hay to the cows but had a hard time even getting out of home due to the snow had blown our roads shut and then we could only get to the cows with one load of hay a day and a load of range cake . Not nearly enough but there wasn ’ t anything else we could do . Finally in Mid-February we were able to get dug out enough and got neighbors to help with stock trailers and hauled cows ’ home where they had to trail the last 1 ½ miles to home because we still couldn ’ t get down our lane with a stock trailer loaded .
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BULLIS CREEK RANCH , WOOD LAKE , NE