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Cold MacDonald had a farm...
by Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
December 10, 2002

Natalie Schmitt helps her husband Mark emerge from the hole he must use to work inside this grain bin. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

This time of year in Minnesota, everyone watches the weather. But just like every other time of year, farmers watch the skies a little more seriously than most people. Next year's income depends on the thermometer and the snow cover. It also depends on the countless chores that just won't wait for spring, no matter how cold it gets in the meantime.

Rice, Minn. — Just inside the barn on her central Minnesota dairy farm, Natalie Schmitt is happy to dispel one of the great misconceptions about farm life.

"When my husband and I were married about 15 years ago, he promised me that, you know, 'In the wintertime we slow down, we don't work as hard as we do from spring to fall,'" she says. "In 15 years I'm still waiting for that slow time to hit."

	Natalie Schmitt, in the cow-heated barn

Just outside, her husband, Mark, is pounding from the inside of a cold, metal soybean bin, lying on its side. He and his brother Al are trying to get the lid off, so they can add segments and make it larger for the spring. With the harvest in, their acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa near Rice don't demand constant attention at the moment. And that's fine, because the rest of the operation gets a little more complicated.

"The colder weather makes the equipment run harder," Schmitt says. "The diesel jells up into the tractor so you have to keep them on heaters, the manure freezes into the spreaders when you're hauling out manure every day, water pipes freeze, cattle slip on ice, gates jam, silo unloaders will block up because the feed has frozen into the silos, and you have to climb up there and chop that out to get the feed down for the cattle."

A few more steps inside the barn, the climate shifts. Eighty cows, at 102 degrees each, add up to a heat factory. These Holsteins are comfy as can be, and they've grown longer hair to keep them warm outside. But what worries the Schmitts are large temperature swings.

	Camera-shy cow

"When the temperature gets above freezing, into the 40s and even the 50s like we've seen earlier this winter, it causes problems with pneumonia," says Natalie Schmitt. "The cattle can't sweat, they can't get the moisture off of them, they get cold, they get chilled because the temperatures at night will drop down. And so the temperatures fluctuate, causing pneumonia to set in, and that can set a lot of animals back for rate-of-gain and for production."

Warm days can also melt the frost on the barn and keep things damp, making it easier for other diseases to spread. Non-farmers might not like it much, but zero to 20-degree days are ideal out here.

Cold is also good for the fields. It can kill off crop pests and keeps alfalfa in the ground from germinating early.

But it is possible to get too much of a good thing. Not only does extreme cold make winter chores miserable, but fields can freeze up. If frost extends deep into the soil, it can delay planting in the spring and damage perennial crops like alfalfa.

	Mark Schmitt

According to Mark Schmitt, the best insurance against frozen fields can be a little bit of snow. "We like six to eight inches of snow," he says. "That eliminates the real deep frost and helps the alfalfa for the following year."

This year there's extra reason to hope the frost won't go too deep. The summer was extremely wet in some parts of the state; the Schmitts' soil, for example, was saturated with 40 inches of rain between July and September. Over the winter, much of the excess water can drain from the saturated soil. But frost will trap the extra moisture there, making it a continued problem next spring.

El Niño may mean farmers like the Schmitts won't get exactly what they want this Christmas. University of Minnesota climatologist Mark Seeley says weather patterns far away, over the Pacific Ocean, suggest warm temperatures on the way to Minnesota.

	The cow in winter

"El Niño tends to stack the odds in favor of above-normal temperatures for the December, January and February period," Seeley says. "But it's by no means a perfect correlation, and I think people should remember that." In fact, Seeley says he's not putting much stock in the usual prediction models this year. Lately arctic patterns are trumping El Niño for control of Minnesota weather.

While there are no clear answers from modern science, there is a more confident forecast in the Old Farmer's Almanac. But even the prediction there offers little comfort this year to farmers like the Schmitts: Temperatures typically four degrees above normal this winter, with well below-normal snowfall for the upper Midwest.

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