Well if December set the pattern for our winter season. We may be in for some of the toughest weather we’ve had since the ‘70s. Congress held hearings back then and sent scientists off to find out why it had turned so cold. That makes me wonder what happened to the CO2 heating theory. The palm trees on Lake Michigan in Chicago we were promised to have frozen last week. This whole issue goes back to the effects of nature like heating and cooling of the oceans. This is even caused by eruptions of volcanoes way under the sea.
But people keep saying heating of the earth is by CO2. They have used dubious records to prove it is happening and in truth our temperatures have been level.
Keep on your guard; these people will not go away.
Speaking about snow, years ago I was checking on some broiler houses on Christmas Eve. I found the grower in a snowstorm, dragging a disc that barely scratched the earth and a barrel seeder behind it strewing grass seed behind his old tricycle IH tractor and sowing a mixture of ryegrass and fescue. I stopped him laughing at his project and he shook his head. “Sowing grass or even clover in the snow is the best condition you can get.” Off he went, watching his scratching in the snow to mark the edge where he needed to sow it. At the moment, that looked as silly as one could get. But the next spring I was there when he was baling end-to-end square bales of hay on that same ground he had planted in the snow. He stopped his tractor and laughed that day. “I told you last Christmas it would work.”
I gave him that one. I have since known lots of farmers who sow clover in the snow to add it in the mix and get results. Many farmers get good yields by sowing fescue in the chicken litter they spread on their fields. Some broadcast it on the chicken house floor; others climb on the truck before it leaves and strew seed on the load. I always use a one part annual ryegrass in my mixture to three parts fescue. In pasture the cows will eat it first, but it makes a better sod and establishes easier.
A neat farmer I knew named Wils Smith was born and raised west of Winslow, Ark., went with me one day to the sale and the coop to get some feed. He bought cottonseed cake and salt and sent the boy waiting on us to get two pounds of Bermudagrass seed. The young man argued it was way too cold to plant that seed. He didn’t care, he wanted that seed. The youth went and filled his order.
The next summer, I was in his pasture on a once broomsedge field and Bermuda had taken it over. I could not believe it. He fed it every winter until he had Bermuda all over his farm.
Sod seeding after drought years became popular but it doesn’t have to be fancy if you get the moisture right. Many of us learned before they isolated the fungus in fescue that 2-year-old seed didn’t have the fungus, which made better forage than 1-year-old seed.
Good luck if you sow seed on the snow and we will all be looking to a spring thaw. Thanks goodness we had a good hay season last year.
May the Good Lord bless and keep you and America, Dusty Richards
