September 07, 2004

And the rains came down!

Well, we really paid for the week of nice haying weather Sunday afternoon/evening through Monday morning. A severe thunderstorm hit our area Sunday afternoon while we were milking and, after that passed, the rain continued through the night and into Monday morning. The rainfall total was close to three inches.

It was pretty wild in the milking parlor during the storm. We were about half done milking when the storm hit. At one point the power went off for about 5 minutes. We stood there in the dark, listening to the cows eat their grain while we hoped and prayed that the power would come back on soon. Our farm has never had a generator or even a generator hookup to connect a generator to supply power to the farm in case of a severe power outage. Most farms in our area have a pto-powered generator on the farm that they can run with one of their tractors to give them power to milk their cows, run feeding equipment, and cool their milk. Once the power came back on, we put the milking machines back on the cows we were milking when the power went out and went on with the milking. The lights flickered a few more times, but we didn't lose power again.

All the animals made it through the rain in good shape. With all the rain it will make it harder for Dennis to finish cropping his fields. He risks making ruts in his fields when he tries to crop them. Some of his fields actually have water sitting in them. Farmers risk compacting the soils in their fields when they are trying to do cropping when the fields are so wet. It has certainly been a challenging summer weatherwise for the farmers here in Vermont.

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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Posted by Blogger Chris at September 7, 2004 09:56 AM
Comments

I fail to see how moving carbon offsets and renewable energy credits around has any effect on climate netural. Did someone or some generator ofthese items shut down during the conventions to generate the offsets ?

Posted by: Lyle Moody at September 7, 2004 04:54 PM