Goodness, it's COLD outside 🥶
How to appreciate outdoor chores when it's -30°
Hello Friends,
If you’re in or around Lincoln, NE (like us!) you are WELL aware of the terrible cold that we’ve been dealing with this past week or so.
Over the last several days, we’ve had negative windchills… even as low as -30°!
On an average weekday, this is our schedule for morning and evening chores:
Morning - 5:45am (after waking at 5am and a quick reading time, so that we can be out the door and headed to work by 7:15ish)
Evening - 4:30pm (after we get home from work)
Note: Weekends are slightly different since we don’t both have to rush to get to/from work
Here’s a couple pictures from last year when it dropped down to -40° for a week or two 👇🏻
(we haven’t gotten around to taking photos this time around!)
You might think that when the temperatures are extreme like this, we would just get chores done fast and get back inside.
Although we would LOVE for that to be the case… it doesn't tend to work out that way most of the time.
We’ve found that chores generally take much longer to complete when the weather is bad and/or the temperatures are extremely cold (like this week) because things like this happen:
since it is unsafe to turn on the hose to our cow water tank/float system, we have to manually fill and walk 8-10 (heavy) 5 gallon water buckets from the hydrant to their tanks
our fancy chicken water bucket failed and/or iced over in one coop, so we had to pull a swaparoo to an open heated dog water bowl (which is much smaller an has to be refilled more often)
it was too cold for our 9 month old baby goats in their outdoor pen and little shelter area, so we decided to carry all 3 of them over to the main red barn in a special pen with heat lamps and lots of bedding
that same red barn usually has all of the dutch doors open year round, but for special days like we’ve had this past week, we decide to lock all the goats in the barn at bedtime and shut the doors to prevent the wind and chill from affecting them
Every year, we spend most of November and December preparing our farm for the cold months of January and February, but that doesn’t mean things like our heated water buckets will decide to cooperate.
They just simply could not keep up with the cold and brutal winds so we’ve also had to break ice off of the top layer of the water buckets so that our animals could get to the water to drink.
Goats, Sheep, Cows, and Chickens - all of them had water bucket issues.
For several days.
Sometimes AT LEAST twice a day.
This weekend, even two hours after chores were done we were already back outside breaking ice in our heated water buckets and then proceeding to fish out all of that ice from the buckets.
(Praise the Lord for old metal strainers!)
On days like this we spend way more time outside caring for our animals than we normally do.
Our animals do well as long as they have good shelters and can get out of the wind but we still feel for them because we know it has to be hard on their little bodies not to be able to escape the cold.
Therefore we, as their shepherds, do all we can to make sure they have good food, good shelter, and fresh clean water on days like this so that they do not have more stress than necessary.
Thankfully, this morning at chores was a whole heck of a lot “warmer” at a whopping 13°.
Farming for us is a fantastic practice in patience, knowledge that we are never really in control, and remembering that even if our nose hair is frozen that we can still choose joy and gratitude for the struggles of stewardship.
These animals are a blessing to us, and we want to always remember that.
Hope you all stay warm!
-Jeffrey and Lorraine
P.S. If your hands are as tired of winter as we are, we have something that can help! Our Goat Milk Soap is one small thing that helps keep our hands soft and smooth, even during this extreme weather. Try some today!