January 14, 2022
These frigid temperatures are very stressful for livestock farmers! I constantly worry how our animals are coping with this arctic blast, even though I never worry about the deer, wild turkeys, or any of our forest dwelling neighbors. I just assume they know what they’re doing as they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. They, in fact, have far less protection than our wooly sheep and chubby pigs but intuitively I know they are fine. Nature, over the eons, has a way of sorting this all out.
Sheep, like all ruminates (including deer) have stomachs with four separate chambers in which microbial fermentation helps digest all they’ve eaten. It also generates a fair amount of body heat, so when the temperatures drop, we feed them extra hay to keep their furnaces well stoked. The sheep appear totally undaunted by the cold; heat waves, in fact, are much more of a problem for our wooly friends.
The pigs sleep in massive pig piles and when they get up to greet me in the morning, the steam coming out of their nest is impressive. The hay they have been sleeping in is hot to touch and smells like fermenting green tea. If it weren’t for the fact that they are constantly shifting the hay around, I’d worry that it might spontaneously combust.
The chickens don’t ever seem to notice the cold, but they, in fact, are in more danger of getting frost bitten than the mammals. A chicken’s comb dissipates heat and helps keeps them cool in hot weather, but all that exposed flesh becomes a serious liability when the temperature drops. Breeds of chickens that evolved in northern climates tend to have very small combs, whereas their southern counterparts have large fleshy combs. Our rooster has a very large flamboyant (my term not his) comb so he is at risk for sure.
We have cameras in all our barns now so when I hear the wind howling in the middle of the night, I can check on the animals without disturbing them. I can watch the sheep as they contentedly chew their cud and digest their hay. I can listen to the pigs snoring in unison and see the chickens roosting in the rafters above. The hens are all lined up, side by side, with the rooster in the middle sleeping peacefully - his magnificent comb tucked under his massive wing. Nature really does have a way of sorting this out.