It has been a very frustrating, work-intensive past two weeks. And the deep freeze temperatures we've been enduring have had more that their share to do with it. They say that it's supposed to get to the plus side of zero today - I'm not convinced since the sun isn't shining and the wind is blowing a skiff of snow around - but it is more civilized out there than is has been for three weeks.
The first week at nearly 40 below is par for the course; we can usually count on that at least once a winter. The second week, it a bit much, but we're tough, we made it through okay. That last week was a case of ENOUGH ALREADY! I'm a pretty complacent gal, but that was just too long.
And, by the middle of week two, how humans were dealing with the cold took second place to how it was affecting other things. I did the chores after dark on Thursday last week and, although I didn't go right over to see if the watering bowl was working there were a couple of animals over there and they looked like they were happily drinking water so we're assuming that things were going okay then. The next morning when Glen fed them their grain he found the waterers froze up, but wasn't too worried about it as he went off to work - he was sure that it was just a fuse to change to thaw out the water lines in the well house. He was so wrong.
The cattle out in the pasture are eating snow for their water intake, but the three bulls, about seven cows that need some TLC, and 47 feeder calves are in corral systems that don't give them access to enough fresh snow for them to be able to do the same. We have to provide them water and we have a water system that does this automatically. Or, until last week we did.
The house gets its water from a well, but the barn is set up to draw water from the duggout (about 250 feet from the barns) up to where four heated watering bowls self fill as the animals drink. Any problems that we've had before was when the watering bowl froze because the heater failed. This time the water line froze somewhere along that 250 foot stretch, and it's not an easy fix at all.
The underlying problem is probably the extremely low water table. Our duggout is only about half full. The line is buried at least eight feet deep so that the frost can't get down far enough to freeze the pipes, and normally, if the duggout was full, the water would cover the line as it enters the duggout, too. This year there just isn't enough cover to do the job. Possibly, if we had anticipated this happening, we could have spread bales for extra cover, but that's just a case of hindsight now. And, there's no time to sit and think about what should have been, there's water to haul!
It took Glen and Mitchell two days to get set up to water the animals with an above ground tank. They had to find a tank to haul water in, and one to haul it to. They had to insulate the watering tank so that it didn't freeze solid too, and those animals need about three truckloads per day to keep them happy. All this was done at 40 below with the wind chill, remember, but waiting for a better day wasn't an option.
Yesterday we three (Glen, Mitchell, and myself) spent the day trying to implement Glen's plan to thaw the pipes out from the well house end, but although it would work on paper, there are just too many feet of pipe to go through before we can get to the problem, and starting at the other end (chopping a hole in the ice and fishing out the other end) isn't an option. It was a very disappointed Glen who finally conceeded last night and will have to hire someone to come dig down beside the duggout and install a new intake pipe at a lower level than the one that froze, and splice it into the rest of the line. That'll cut into our profit margin this year!
But, as I said, the past day or two has been a little bit more bearable so at least we aren't freezing fingers and toes off when we're hauling water anymore. We are praying for lots and lots of snow though! I hope every single slough and pothole is full of water this spring.
