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Just when people thought they might be free from the cold grasp of winter, another round of snow and cold weather hit southwestern Saskatchewan over the weekend.
While producers in the province usually welcome moisture, the return of winter weather could present some serious issues for calving season.
“It’s getting old, the neverending winter,” Jocelyn Wasko told Real Ag on The Weekend with Shaun Haney, which can be heard Saturdays at 4 p.m. on 650 CKOM. “We kind of feel like we’re in Groundhog Day or something.”
Wasko is a rancher in Eastend. She said a lot of people in the community don’t have calving barns, so many cows are expected to give birth on native grass.
“(They can give birth) in the hills, ideally on green grass (or) bare ground,” Wasko said. “So right now we’re just kind of like playing each day by ear hoping that warmer temperatures are coming (and) some more bare ground comes.”
Wasko owns a mixed operation and said she has cows that are giving birth for the first or second time set up inside a barn to make it easier to assist them. But the only area of bare ground available for the mature cows right now is their feeding ground.
“We haven’t even moved them onto the spring calving pasture yet,” she said. “We can’t actually access the gates because we’ve got about a six-foot snowdrift in front from the roads being plowed.”
Wasko said some nights were as cold as -32 C, which hurts the chances of a calf’s survival.
Wasko said for a calf born outside at night, any temperatures below -10 C are almost guaranteed to kill them, especially if they aren’t wrapped in straw or something of the sort.
“We’re just really hoping that Mother Nature smartens up before everything starts going full bore here with those mature cows,” Wasko said.
“We’ve been looking at the forecast and it keeps saying it’s going to happen and then you wake up and it’s -17. So I don’t know when these melting days are coming.
“Part of me wants it to warm up slowly so that it really soaks into the ground, but I think I’m past that now. I just want it to be gone. I’m sick of the snow.”
