Deaths, Milk Losses Hinder Dairy Industry In Winter Storm Goliath's Aftermath

Surviving a blizzard, Hope earned her new name.
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Two months old and mostly black with a few white markings, the shy but strong-willed calf was nearly buried in snow last week. In the aftermath of Winter Storm Goliath, she became the first of Dutch Road Dairy’s bovine residents found alive. Staff then spent hours removing snow piles from the rest of their calf hutches and managed to save all but one of the youngsters.
“We’re probably gonna call her Hope,” co-owner Nancy Beckerink said as the calf peaked curiously from her hutch.
Not every adult cow was so lucky.
The blizzard killed about 5 percent of the region’s mature dairy cows and a yet-unknown number of calves and heifers, according to the Texas Association of Dairymen.
That region north and west of Lubbock — think Muleshoe and Friona — is home to about 36 percent of Texas’ dairy cows, or about 142,800 cows. That means the storm gave a devastating punch to an entire industry.
“Like all agriculture, dairy producers always operate at the mercy of Mother Nature,” Darren Turley, executive director of the Texas Association of Dairymen, said in a statement. “With Goliath, she dealt a particularly harsh and costly blow to the area’s dairy producers, from the death of thousands of livestock they spend so much time caring for to a loss of milk production both over the weekend and in the future.”
Dutch Road, located just northwest of Muleshoe, lost about 300 cows. Finding their frozen bodies was heartbreaking, but deaths won’t be their biggest monetary loss. That title goes to hindered milk production.
Some survivors are unmilkable, and others nearly so. They won’t fully recover their production levels overnight, either.
“The ones that lived and are still producing milk are producing less milk,” Beckerink. “It’s gonna be a long-term issue. We’re gonna be dealing with this — cow health and production — for a year.”
 
Painful delay
Dairy cows are normally milked three times a day. But in the heart of the blizzard, Dutch Road’s had to wait a full two days between milkings.
As a sixth-generation dairy farmer and a New York native, Beckerink is no stranger to weather troubles. Not milking, though, was a first.
“We’ve never had to stop milking before,” she said. “…We just had no idea how bad (Goliath) would be.”
Beckerink and her husband, Matt, spent the few days between the blizzard forecast and its arrival in preparation. They arranged bales of corn stocks to block from the feed alleys, fed their heifers double and moved extra feed and equipment to the dairy.
The storm blew into Bailey County late morning Saturday. As dust turned to heavy wind gusts and then to sharp, icy precipitation, workers could barely move through pastures to bring the cows to the milking area. Meanwhile, many of the cows huddled, refusing to move.
“It wasn’t safe for the milkers to go out and chase them,” Beckerink said. “For them to be out there would be dangerous.”
Other dairies suffered financially when they were forced to dispose of milk loads that tanker trucks were unable to reach in dangerous road conditions.
 
Other livestock
Beef cattle used their environment to survive the storm slightly better than their dairy counterparts, Blake Birdwell said. For example, some might have found a hill to hide behind.
“Beef cattle are a different specimen,” he said. “They’re able to be on native pastures where they can use the terrain to protect themselves and their young.”
Well, some of them were. Others succumbed to the blizzard.
Birdwell owns the Hip O Cattle Co. in downtown Muleshoe and serves on the board of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. He’s hesitant to complain when his dairy-producing neighbors have suffered more, but still disappointed about the hurt in his industry.
The rancher estimates about 30,000 to 40,000 cattle left homes in the Panhandle-South Plains during the storm. Many of those have since been located, but at least some of them froze to death. Exact numbers are far from determined.
“From the snow drifts, we’re starting to uncover mass graves of cattle,” he said. “We’ll see the aftermath of this storm all the way into May.”
But what do you do with a mass heap of dead cows?
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality holds set guidelines for disposal of livestock carcasses. For example, animals can’t be buried near a water well or lake or river.
The commission recommends rendering whenever possible, spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said. It is working with dairy and livestock associations and has not received any calls from individual dairies or feedlots, she added.
Birdwell said he is seeking an increase on the weight limits for rendering trucks, which would allow them to retrieve more carcasses in fewer trips.
 
Cooperation
Many farmers and ranchers have teamed up to endure the storm’s impact.
The Beckerinks have welcomed friends visiting from New York and Ohio, and are extra thankful for their staff.
“Our employees are just fantastic — they’re taking care of the cows,” Nancy Beckerink said.
And in the cattle-searching chaos, a network seems to have arisen. Complete with a “Cattle Lost and Found” Facebook page, the rancher-and-cowboy structure connects owners with their bovine runaways.
“When you have a natural disaster like we’ve seen, it brings out the best and the worst in people,” Birdwell said.
On the “worst in people” side, some folks who encounter lost cattle see dollar signs. For their law enforcement efforts against those thieves, Birdwell is thankful for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association’s special rangers.
But he’s quick to stress those sticky-fingered cattle-finders are in the minority:
“As bad as the blizzard was, with landowners and cattle owners, we’ve seen a massive amount of cooperation between the two entities. I’m seeing more of the best come out of people than I am the worst.”
 
Source: Lubbock
 

Mirá También

Así lo expresó Domingo Possetto, secretario de la seccional Rafaela, quien además, afirmó que a los productores «habitualmente los ignoran los gobiernos». Además, reconoció la labor de los empresarios de las firmas locales y aseguró que están «esperanzados» con la negociación entre SanCor y Adecoagro.

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