Tag: winter

Years on the farm, calving season

Calving barn under construction 1975

Many years ago in the seventies my wife and I were running a cattle farm located about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. This is the first in a series about our life on the farm

We eventually had about two hundred head of cattle with around 65 calves being born each year. The calves were typically born in February and March which as you might guess is a cold, snowy time in the part of Canada where we lived. For some reason, most calves like to be born at night.

Raising cattle is not the kind of thing where lots of help is available unless you have a a large family. Calving season is especially tough because it demands 24 hours a day attention. I would make two to three trips a night to our calving area which was in the woods around the second barn we built. It is hard to get out of a warm bed, suit up for the cold, and head outside not knowing what you would find.

The walk up the hill to the small field by the woods where the cattle were fenced was not a long one. Even with the walk back to the house it was only about six tenths of a mile. It seemed much longer in blowing snow especially since a good part of the walk went through the grove of tall spruce trees that separated our farm house from the barns.

Of course there were no street lights in the spruce forest. You had to go on that walk no matter what the weather. If I found a cow that had calved, I would walk the new calf to the barn between my legs and the new mother would follow. I would put the calf and cow in a stall filled with nice clean straw. Sometimes there would be more than one birth during a night. Depending on the weather the cow and calf would stay in the open front barn two to three days and then go back to join the herd. I had a larger pen in the barn where I could turn the cow and calve if things got crowded in the individual pens.  

Once the cow and calf went back with herd, the calves had a special place for protection. The front part of the barn was arranged so that the calves could get under cover on dry straw during wet weather. With the barn facing south it made a nice place for them on a sunny day. Sometimes the straw looked like it was blanketed with calves. I remember looking over there one time and my oldest daughter who had just started school was sitting there in the sunshine in the middle of a dozen sleeping red and black Angus calves.

My relatives who were back in North Carolina asked me more than once if the walk in the dark scared me. I would always calmly tell them that walking through the dark woods in area most would call wilderness was safer than walking around Boston when I was in college.There was nothing in the woods that could harm me especially in the winter. All the bears and there were lots of them were hibernating. The moose were deep in the swamps and the rest of the critters were more afraid of me than I was of them.

There is one thing almost certain about the northern woods. When the temperature is down around minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit, there are no crazed muggers hiding in the three to four feet of snow in the spruce forest. They would be frozen like a Popsicle pretty quick.

The only good thing about calving season was that it was over in six to eight weeks. Getting the calves out of the snowy, wet weather was a good prescription for healthy calves. No one at the department of agriculture told us that this was the way we should raise calves. We figured it out ourselves. They also though that it was impossible to raise cattle using round bales. We put up over two hundred each year and proved that they worked. We could have used another barn for the bales but there was not a lot of money in cattle at the time.

In our ten years raising cattle, we never had a vet on the farm for a sick calf. I sometimes struggle to believe that myself and the fact that I cannot remember ever losing a calf. There were plenty of other adventures like the time a teenager on a motorbike chased a dozen heifers deep into the woods. It took most of the summer to get them back but that is a story for next time.

The First Frost

Raymond’s Gut with a few inches of ice during a previous winter

When we living on the North Carolina coast, we always considered the first cold day to be the one when we had to give up wearing shorts. Only the first two weeks of February were reliably cold. The picture of the frozen body of water (Raymond’s Gut) was taken during a Febraury cold snap in Carteret County. The trouble with packing your shorts away was that warmth could descend on the coastal area almost at any time. The result was that I rarely gave up my shorts while living at the coast. When I lived on the farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, the first cold day was when I had to start wearing mittens. That was actually a whole lot colder than you might think. I rarely used mittens until it got below zero Fahrenheit.
Growing up in North Carolina, cold is not something you think about very much. To me it was cold when the red dirt banks sparkled with frost crystals. As I got older and went winter camping with our Boy Scout Troop 752 at Camp Raven Knob, I got to know real cold. There is nothing like rain and chilly weather to make you appreciate a nice warm home. Still it was not serious cold.
The first serious cold that I remember was on a trip freshman year (1967) from Cambridge to Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. I cannot remember why we went, but I do remember it being minus twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit the Saturday morning we left. Fortunately, serious cold does bother you very long if you are in a car with a functioning heater. Still it left an impression. While temperatures in Cambridge got down into single digits, they could not come close to the Hanover freeze.
Sometime in my college years I caught a snow-loving virus. That and a obsession with having some land of my own led me to head off to Maritime Canada after graduation. In the early seventies land was cheap in Nova Scotia and life seemed like a throwback to life in the fifties in the United States.
The old house that I bought on the shore of the Bay of Fundy was not exactly the warmest house around. In spite of lots of efforts and a newly built fireplace, it could still be cold especially since the wind often howled in St. Croix Cove where the house was. That part of Nova Scotia was famous for storms that went from rain to snow to sleet to freezing rain back to snow accompanied by bitter cold.
Fortunately, for the snow loving part of me, the lousy Nova Scotia weather was also bad for running cattle outside so my wife and I decided to move to New Brunswick. Without much thought other than falling in love with the farm, we ended up in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the middle of New Brunswick’s snow belt. Our first winter we had over twenty feet of snow. We also got to endure minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit that first year. In January of 1982, when our youngest daughter was born one January, the thermometer dipped to minus forty with an accompanying blizzard and high winds.
Most years in New Brunswick the first real cold came in the first week or so December just about the time busy mothers needed to finish up their Christmas shopping. You could tell the real cold weather had arrived when on successive days the previous day’s low would become the next day’s high temperature. Things would continue that way as we started plugging our cars in until the temperature bottomed out at something seriously below zero Fahrenheit.
I endured some bitter cold on our New Brunswick farm but I doubt that I ever felt colder than when I went fishing in a skiff on the rainy, wind morning of October 25, 2005 with the temperature in the forties. When we finished fishing that morning and I was dropped off at the dock, it only took me about a block of walking before I realized that I could not feel my extremities. There is nothing like being completely soaked in the wind to make cold penetrate to your bones. I had to spend some serious time in a very hot tub bath before I recovered. It is no surprise that I did not feel cold while I was catching all the fish. That fishing trip remains one of my coldest memories next to sitting on a brick hard seat in my pickup at minus forty.
Since we have moved back to North Carolina’s Piedmont, cold weather has become a little more dependable. Most years we see a little snow. In 2024, our first frost was October 20th. ‘We have already beaten that. It looks like that in 2025, the first chance for frost will be no earlier than Wednesday, October 23 when our low temperature is forecasted to reach 36F.
This potential frost got me to thinking about the tales that my mother used to tell. She was born in 1910 and told us of stories of her father taking teams of horses out on their frozen mill pond to cut ice and store it for the summer in a deep hole insulated with saw dust. That would not be too much of a surprise had she not lived in the foothills of North Carolina, just west of Winston-Salem. The mill pond which was part of so many of her stories was near Yadkinville, North Carolina which is not exactly known as one the earth’s cold spots.
A little climate research indicates western North Carolina the earlier 1910s was cooler than our current weather. Since then the trend has been steadily warmer with a noticeable peak in the 1950s.
I cannot remember anyone telling me about people skating on ponds in central North Carolina during the fifties when I grew up. There certainly was no report of driving teams of horses onto the frozen ponds. I cannot even remember a pond freezing over.
My son pulled our tomatoes out yesterday but that was more from being tired of looking after tomatoes than the danger of frost. Needless to say, I will still be wearing shorts when I go out to the front porch to read the next few days. When I change to blue jeans, it is going to have to be a whole lot colder. The weather might be sweatshirt worthy.