Predicting Predictors

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The weather forecasts are not always reliable, but we still watch them with eager anticipation or dread depending on what is being said. Over the last week, predictions about the coldest Thanksgiving in the last ten years and a chance of snow in the valley including Portland had everyone watching for the latest updates. Here on the farm we went into overdrive trying to get ahead of the upcoming possibility of bad weather.

We installed green weaner clips on the next three heifer calves that were due to be weaned. We were thinking we could get them clipped, weaned in the big fields with the main herd and moved away from their mothers before the snow and possible ice hampered moving the stock trailer back and forth across the river and the county road.

The cold weather had hit as predicted. The temps dropped into the teens for a couple of days right after we got our tender seedlings planted. We were very lucky to have gotten them all in and we breathed a sigh of relief over those efforts. On Saturday morning, we moved the stock trailer across to the main herd barn and loaded the heifers for their small journey out to the show barn by the house side of the road and river. It was still very cold, the pickup and trailer bounced over the frozen muck ruts but we got the heifers unloaded successfully in the barn where we can spoil them with the last of the apple crop sliced for their dining pleasure. Grain is also on the menu, a new taste treat that they had not experienced before, and all the sweet grass hay they want.

By mid-day, the clouds started to roll in and we began checking the forecasts again for the likelihood of snow or with the ground being frozen solid, ice. Predictors were continuing to claim that snow was on its way and should hit during the night. Even my personal weather station with an electrode outside was flashing snow, snow, snow (normally I take the weather station info with a grain of salt, a weather rock is more likely to be correct. You know the one, if the rock is wet it is raining, if it is white it is snowing, if it has ice on it then it is frozen outside, if it is dry then you should expect to see sunshine.) My weather station is about as predictable.

Sure enough, when I woke the next morning we had a couple of inches of snow that dropped on the really cold ground, so it will probably hang around for a couple of days. I wonder if that is what the predictors will predict?