(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Unknowable Wetness of Snow: Farming in Canada [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-11 I took this out my kitchen window on the ranch, a yard full of pregnant deer. I sometimes tell people I raise free range, fence free deer. They usually don’t get the joke. You can see how prosperous we are. In order to understand this essay you may need some translation assistance unless you have a Maple Leaf tattooed on your butt (I am admitting nothing). I want you to imagine an American High School Football Field. It needs to be one with a track around it. They are everywhere in the western United States. Imagine the football field without the end zones. That is one acre. Well, to be precise it is 1.08 acres. But it gives you an idea of the most common measurement in US farming, the acre. Canada officially uses the Hectare as its measurement for farms. The conversion to acres is 2.47 acres in a hectare. Returning to our football field, the area inside the track will typically be 1 hectare almost exactly. At least if the track is 400 meters and most are. The other thing you need to know is that in Canada ranches are considered a type of farm. In the United States ranches and farms are considered two separate things. In Canada I am a farmer who ranches and in the US I am a rancher. I am going to talk in this essay about what we call the home ranch here in East Central Alberta. It is approximately 11,000 hectares of which 3,000 is devoted to crop farming and the rest is wild land, pasture, grasslands, and rewilded areas. Around here this is a midsized farm. It is in 9 parcels in 6 counties. In those six counties there are 18 farms over 20,000 hectares. I was helping cows have calves Tuesday night February 21st, on the home ranch. It was -36.4 Fahrenheit. I was doubting my choice of occupation. Our calving barns are heated to 59 Fahrenheit so helping the expectant mothers deliver healthy babies was easy and warm. Cows in labor generate a lot of heat so 59 quickly becomes 70+. Actually, cattle in general generate a lot of heat. Maybe I should edit that sentence about easy and warm. It was easy and warm once we got all the cows that were ready to give birth to the calving barn. I ended up delivering two cows in the most remote of our three sided pole barns. It wasn’t that cold in the the barn surrounded by straw bales and pregnant cows. Getting there on the other hand was both hard and cold. There were serious snow drifts between the farm yard and this pole barn. We wanted to leave the drifts to melt naturally (I will explain in just a moment why) and that was one of the reasons I decided to walk. This is one of the last out buildings without power. I knew I would likely be out there eight hours or more and no vehicle can sit unplugged for that long unprotected from the elements when it is this cold and still be sure to start. I couldn’t ask horses to stand around that long either so I made the trip on snowshoes. The windchill made it feel like -44 Fahrenheit. The thing is I grew up in a climate much colder than it was here on that Tuesday night. I traveled much further on snowshoes and cross country skis being a ranch hand. Now, I know you don’t expect cow pokes to travel on snowshoes and skis but where I come from it isn’t that uncommon. I am going to take you there in the next essay in this series but now, for something completely different. The unknowable wetness of snow. The home ranch is in eastern East Central Alberta and this whole region gets very little rain. Our land mostly gets significantly less than 10 inches of rain. In other words we farm in a desert. We are dry land farmers. Dry land farmers don’t use irrigation. I am the only farmer in this region who has irrigation rights. A major tributary of the North Saskatchewan starts on our land and it’s a full blown river by the time it leaves. There are springs, bogs, fens, wetlands and kettle lakes all over our land. And in the summer extremely high humidity mean less moisture is needed to grow crops. This is called being a damp desert. The land itself is rich in Bentonite Clay which is an absorbent aluminium phyllosilicate clay. It absorbs and holds on to moisture. Phyllo, like phyllo pastry, in sheets of flaky perfection. Silicate, as in made of sand. In this case flaky sand sheets rich in aluminum. When it’s wet driving on Bentonite is like driving on small ball bearings. The sheets slide around on each other and the sheets shatter leaving tiny pieces that sit and slip on each other like small ball bearings. Large amounts, deep piles of ball bearings, piles that can swallow your tractor. I have buried more than one tractor so deep in the Bentonite that you couldn’t see the tires. This my way of saying we can get a good crop with only three inches of rain as long as spring melt contains enough moisture to get the crop started. There is, however, no way of knowing exactly how much water there is in snow. Most of us have probably seen wet snow so heavy with water you can barely lift half a shovel load without straining your back. If you can shovel it at all. Presumably most of us have seen snow so light the slightest breeze will blow it away. When and where it falls matters as well. Snow ablates, in this sense ablation refers to the reduction of the water equivalent of a snow cover by melting, evaporation, wind and avalanches. We have some very steep land, later this spring I will take pictures, that is full south facing with no trees or large shrubs. Snow cover doesn’t stay and grasses dominate the landscape. If it is sunny and windy and -40 Fahrenheit the snow still evaporates. Wind can also be your friend in terms of maximizing the water equivalent content of snow. If spring comes with clouds and cool temperatures a lot of snow will remain to melt when the ground is warm enough to soak it up. But spring usually gets warm enough to melt snow while the ground is still frozen and the water runs off the land into creeks and streams and around here heads off to the Atlantic Ocean. In order to have snow left to join our ground water and moisten our fields we work with the wind to create huge drifts that protect some of the deeper snow from melting earlier. We plant shrubs, legumes, grasses, rushes and sedges, bushes, and even pocket forests where we want the snow to accumulate when it is blowing and drifting. Right now some of those drifts are four or five feet deep, where I grew up in May drifts might be ten feet or more. But for a desert four or five feet is fabulous given we average 7.5 inches of snow a year. This landscaping and contouring are only some of the changes we’ve made to the land. We’ve restored native grasslands, created artificial lakes, encouraged Beaver, replaced fencing with new fences that reflect the latest thinking in fencing ecology, began using cover crops, encouraged natural berry orchards, built bee, bird, and bat houses, reintroduced Bison, and above all gone organic. We are finally making a profit. It only took us 31 years to get there. I will be kind to myself and say there was a slight learning curve. For example, I didn’t think to generate my own power for the first five years and it took me five more to sweet talk a utility into buying our excess power from us at market value. Now solar and wind power generation are our biggest revenue crop. Our land has abandoned gas and oil wells. We got the mineral rights and converted them to use geothermal to heat and cool greenhouses. Those greenhouses are now our second biggest revenue source. You might be thinking this doesn’t much like a ranch. I had to overcome my own ideas and realize a lot of modern farming in Canada is about mechanized crop growing for export. I wanted to restore the grasslands, wet lands, and forests on my land and generating solar power along with commercial gardening and green housing let me do that. I wanted to restore the native Northern Rough Fescue Grassland that once covered our land. I knew it was an incredible carbon sink but mostly I just loved (well still love) looking at miles and miles of grassland sweeping off into the distance. I also wanted to feed people, local people. All of our 11,000 hectares was producing exactly no food when we bought it. It was all purchased at bankruptcy auctions. These bankruptcies occurred because nobody could make a living on the land without massive reinvestment. It will take us another forty years like the last two in order to recoup our investment. It never occurred to me that in pursuing these goals I’d create a carbon negative farm/ranch or end up growing okra, tomatillos and some of the world’s spiciest hot peppers in a place once considered to cold for farming. I think I’ve had a lot of help from global warming. My neighbors say there is no such thing as global warming and I’m a crazy genius. I don’t argue with them on either point, the first being a waste of my time and the second being very useful for getting things done. ————————————————————————— For now, as a teaser for my next essay I am going to take you to the ignition point of what is believed to be the largest contiguous forest fire in North America. The blue flag is where the Chinchaga Fire ignited. The green flag hidden partially behind the blue is where my parents were ranching when the fire ignited on June 1st, 1950 and began burning northeastward and expanding. It caused the Great Smoke Pall of 1950 across North America and Europe. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/11/2154413/-The-unknowable-Wetness-of-Snow-Farming-in-Canada Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/