By Anna King
In a remote part of southeast Oregon, about the only oasis for a hundred-mile stretch of highway is the Oasis Cafe in Juntura. Travelers come in for hot coffee served in hulking styrofoam cups, and to gather near the wood stove.
Rancher Glenn Harris, from Drewsy, said this spring’s bitter cold has been devastating for newborn calves.
“We had probably about two feet of snow, at least, on top of five or six inches of ice,” Harris said, referring to a storm last month. “Those calves are born and they just melt right down to that ice. And if you’re not right there, you’re gonna lose ‘em.”
Usually, the mother gives birth on her own without human help, and licks the newborn dry. But blizzards make things more complicated: the calves can go from about 100 degrees in the womb to zero – or minus several degrees with wind – and wet coats. Not to mention the more typical risks, like when the calf is too big for the mother’s frame, or the baby is breech.
Harris has a herd of mostly red angus. This year, he said he’s lost around 35 calves. About 25 have been injured from frozen joints.
“I mean they can barely walk,” Harris said. “It’s just been a really tough year.”
Tired shovels
We spoke with more than a dozen ranchers for this story, as well as an official from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), two weather experts and a cattle futures broker. The losses from the cold appear to be widespread.
On some ranches in southeast Oregon, the losses have been particularly staggering. Several ranchers estimated that they’ve lost a quarter of their calves to the cold. There’s no way of knowing the exact number – the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service doesn’t count cattle during the spring – but all told, operators believe thousands of calves may have perished across the Northwest, West, and Midwest.
In Oregon last month, temperatures were below average nearly every day. The weather experts – Mary Wister, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service station in Pendleton, and Karin Bumbaco, a researcher with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group – said atmospheric rivers blasting from parts of the Northwest through to the Midwest are partly to blame.
For ranchers, some losses are inevitable – but it’s extremely rare to have so many weather-related deaths.
Linda Owens has a cow-calf operation in McAllister, Montana.
“I’ve worn a shovel out this year digging myself out – my tractor, my pickup with the trailer […] trying to go out and get carcasses off the landscape,” Owens said. “I’ve shoveled more this year than I have for seven years for anything, and my shovel is very tired and I’m going to have to get a new one.”
A lot of the carcasses in Owens’ county go to an animal compost site. There are only two of them in the county, and Owens runs one of them. The other site is full, she said.
In addition to calves, Owens has also picked up several horses who slipped on ice and had to be put down, including one particularly sad case in February.
“He slipped on the ice and broke his leg,” she said. “It was right close in town and so the neighbor saw the horse out there.”
Saving every calf they can
A little further east in Kimball, South Dakota, Colby Olson was feeding his cattle in the snow. He said with hundreds of animals, they wouldn’t all fit in the barn during a bad storm.
Olson said his young children – ages eight, seven and even a three-year-old – have been pitching in by helping him match calves to the right mother.
“The kids, they called off school,” Olson said. “So I was picking up calves and throwing them in the back seat of the pickup. And I’d say, ‘Okay, put a scarf on that calf and remember he’s number 707.’”
Olson and other ranchers say they’re bringing newborn calves inside to blow them dry with hair dryers and get their ears warmed up. Ears and tails are the first to get frostbitten on young calves.
A herd moves slowly with their new calves in snowy conditions in April in Wallowa County, Oregon. (Credit: Angie Nash)
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