Farming in the Deep Snow

The epic snow event they’ve been predicting for the Northland has already begun this morning, blanketing the farm in white. With forecasts for up to 18 inches in our area, we’ve been preparing.

The later half of winter is often the snowiest, with intense, wet and heavy snow events that cut us off from the outside world for a day or two until the plows can dig us out. I remember posting on social media a couple years ago one late-winter morning, “Well, if you have snowshoes, we’ll see you at Farmstead, otherwise we’ll announce when the road is clear!”

Kara has been busy with her skid steer, pushing back banks and digging out paths before this next snow load. Last Friday, new snow and driving winds had compounded drifts that had been accumulating snow upon snow. They’d reached heights where the animals could have leapt over the tops of their fences!

Most winters, Kara has to shovel out racetracks on the inside rim of the pig pens, so they can’t escape over the tops of their fences. Our heritage Kunekune pigs find this quite entertaining, investigating the shoveling adventures and running round and round their new racetracks when they get excited about the arrival of breakfast. After a while, these trails fill in again, and she’ll be re-excavating.

For the sheep in our lamb barn that sits north of the main barn next to the pasture, those Friday winds had drifted quite the banks, and Kara brought the skid steer into their pen to clear the path to their round bale feeder. Pounding through icy layers of snow and packed down discarded stemmy hay, it was like digging a canyon through the drifts. The sides are so high, when the sheep walk through it towards their breakfast, you can’t see them from outside the pen! Imagine what that will look like after this new snow!

For the chicken coops, I keep a grub hoe nearby their door, so I can dig and chip away the packed snow and ice to get inside. Ice also accumulates up against the doors on the inside, and I have to keep the frozen bedding chipped away, so the doors will even close. All aging, grumpy, hand-me-down doors, each one has its own persnickety quirks, swelling at some temps, sagging at others.

In the summertime, it’s a step up into the coops, but in wintertime it’s quite often a step down, and I have to dig out arching swaths of the packed-down snow, just so the doors will be able to open. The ducks don’t seem to mind the snow at all—gleeful to stamp it down with their feet. The turkeys grimly trudge through it with their long legs, but the chickens take one look, make a face, and opt to stay inside with their fresh layer of bedding. “No thanks,” they seem to say, “We’ll wait for spring.”

Our heated aquaponics greenhouse sloughs the snow off its roof. From inside, the spontaneous rushing sound of snow sliding off in great sheets can be quite startling! It piles up in thick banks on either side, transforming the greenhouse into a plastic-topped igloo. Sometimes those banks grow taller than me!

Our smaller high tunnels, however, are not so lucky. If a bright sunny day ensues after the snowstorm, sometimes this will heat the passive solar high-tunnels enough that the snow slides off, but sometimes it stays stuck, adding too much weight to the metal frame structures. We keep a path dug to the door of our 50-foot long high-tunnel, so we can still manage to crawl inside during snow events like this one. Pounding with our fists inside like we’re in an epic boxing match, we gang up on the heavy snow load, convincing it to let go of the roof and slip down the sides. We’ve seen far too many regional high-tunnels be crushed by snow loads to ignore this buildup, even if our hands and shoulders are thrashed by the pummeling.

Even though the snow makes plenty of work for us on the farm, we still love it—the clean beauty it provides, the hushed landscape, the moisture that will hopefully soak in slowly in the spring. There’s a magic to looking out the window while cradling your mug of steaming tea and feeling like you’re inside a snow globe.

Certainly, we’ll be plying our shovels today, then coming inside for a warmup and a treat. Stay safe out there everyone in this snow! Hunker down, enjoy the beauty, tend to the animals, and we’ll see you down on the farm sometime.