California’s Winter Strikes Hard
California cattleman shares experience.
California isn’t known for cold, harsh winters. In fact, according to Dan Byrd of Byrd Cattle Co., Red Bluff, Calif., many ranchers, especially those in snow country, opt to send their cows to California for a milder calving season. In normal years, that strategy works. The winter of 2022-23 may be the exception.
“We’re coming off four years of severe drought where the state and the feds cut our irrigation water,” describes Byrd.
Humboldt County, Calif., where some of Byrd’s commercial cattle are located, boasts 110 miles of coastline. Substantial rainfall during the winter is common. [Photos courtesy Byrd Cattle Co.] |
There are thousands of acres of prime California farm ground that have been fallowed for the last four years because there was simply no way to irrigate them due to those cutbacks, he explains.
“Now we get this year!” says Byrd. According to his local paper, normal rainfall for his area from Oct. 1 to March 23 is about 16 inches (in.). “We topped 25 inches last night.”
Byrd says the Sacramento Valley hadn’t seen snow in 45 years. This past winter, two individual snowstorms dropped 6-9 in. of snow on the valley floor.
That isn’t the whole of it.
Byrd owns a ranch in Humboldt County, which is on the northern California coast. During peak calving, a freak snowstorm piled 4 feet of snow on the ground.
“Those are some commercial cows that we own. We were right in the middle of calving and never lost a single calf. How those cows did that is beyond me,” he says.
The ranch caretaker was basically left helpless. The phones and electricity were out. There was hay in the barn, but he couldn’t get it to the cows, and the cows couldn’t get to the hay.
Thanks to quick action and coordination by the Humboldt Sheriff’s department, the California Air National Guard and the California Cattlemen’s Association, helicopters dropped hay for Byrd's and neighboring ranchers’ cattle every other day for about a week. Imagine the caretaker’s surprise when literally out of the heavens, a helicopter toting hay bales descended on his winter wonderland.
Finally, after a little over a week, a warm rain fell and melted the snow down to where the cows could survive, recalls Byrd.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on March 24, 2023, announced he would roll back some of the state's most severe drought restrictions on the heels of one of the state’s wettest winters on record.
Editor’s note: Paige Nelson is a freelance writer and cattlewoman from Rigby, Idaho.
