Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Everyone talks about the weather, but no one watches it more carefully than a Wyoming farmer.
I have a couple of friends who have farmed for over a century between the two of them, and they are constantly claiming it’s going to be a dry year no matter what the weather looks like outside, or how high the snow is piled in the mountains.
This season, I’m afraid they’re right. We haven’t had much rain or snow this year. What we did receive came down in one storm at Thanksgiving and another one in early February. That changed in about a half hour last week with lightning flashing, thunder rolling, rain pounding, and finally hail bouncing off our bedroom window at about 10:30 p.m. It was forceful enough that we thought it might break a window. It did shatter a yard light and broke the glass on a weather sensor on our deck.
As we cleared the carnage of broken branches and thousands of cottonwood leaves, I discovered a robin and a meadowlark, both killed by the hail. It’s tougher on the wildlife than we often think.
We have about 10 acres of pasture with five more adjacent acres owned by our son.
An acre is 43,560 square feet. A cubic foot of water is equal to 7.48 gallons. That’s our starting point. If it rains an inch, that’s equivalent to one-twelfth of a foot in a vertical column of water. Now, a little multiplication. Take 43,560, divide it by 12, and multiply it by 7.48. If you calculated that correctly, each of your little acres of paradise received 27,152 gallons of water right out of the sky in last Wednesday’s thunderstorm.
Your totals may be a little more or a little less. The mixture of rain and hail dropped a half inch of water on us.
I had several friends wondering if their measurements of up to an inch were accurate. They thought maybe one of those dime-sized chunks of hail had fallen into their measuring tube. Maybe.
In our case, the total of “free” water since last Wednesday was 203,643 gallons.
That’s a lot of water by any measure.
The old-timers called soaking, slow-moving fronts “Million Dollar Rains,” for obvious reasons. This one wasn’t. It moved fast, ripping branches off trees with gusting winds that were said to reach 60 miles per hour. We didn’t have quite that much speed, but it was substantial.
On my Thursday morning walk, I noticed a porta-potty at the construction site next to the Smart Start Academy on North 8th West blown over. A few minutes later, I saw what appeared to be a snowfield through the homes at the Reach Foundation as I walked west by St. John’s Lutheran Church. It wasn’t snow but instead hail that had fallen and been blown down the street until it hit a right-angled street and began to pile up. It was over a foot deep.
We live in an arid region. A few spots in Fremont County average over 10 inches of rain annually, while a few others, like Shoshoni and Jeffrey City, call two inches a wet year.
My dad always said, “Irrigate through the rain.”
As is often the case, it was my turn for water on our rotation. I get it two days out of every four weeks. It arrived Tuesday night. It was barely covering the dry ground on each set by Wednesday, with over half the sets remaining.
Thursday morning, the two acres below our house were several inches deep in standing water. It took a couple of days for the dry, hot wind that followed later in the week to wick it away. That area has been a bog since I was a little kid. My grandparents and the late Ed Barnes owned the entire section back then, and no matter what Grandpa or Ed tried with ditches to divert the water, it was always just a few inches below the surface. It still is. Dig a post hole, and you’ll hit water at 18 inches throughout the entire two acres.
My dad and I hit the lucky mark a few times over the last half-century with a crop planted, corrugates in place, and ditches pulled, waiting for the Wind River to be diverted. The luck came with a heavy snow that covered the ground with several inches of very dense moisture, or the slow-moving, soaking rain we just experienced. When this happens, the desert literally blooms.
When the rain arrives in a thunderstorm, you get a double whammy of good luck. The lightning charges the nitrogen in the atmosphere to the falling rain, and you get fertilizer better than anything you can buy falling free from the sky.
We attended our nephew Adam’s wedding in Fairfield, Iowa, almost two decades ago. My wife Sue commented on how clean, neatly groomed, and well-kept the farms in that section of the Hawkeye State were.
“Sure, they are,” I said. “These guys don’t have to farm. They just plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. They get all the rain they need, don’t have to get their guts bounced around driving over corrugates, don’t pull ditches, don’t worry about water, and don’t spend a fortune on electricity to keep the pumps going. The wind doesn’t rip the water out of the ground like it does back home either.”
Yes, I think the guys in the Midwest have it much easier than the farmers and ranchers out here do. The “Breadbasket” of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, with its deeper, dark organic soil and abundant moisture, is ideal for cereal grains. It’s not quite that great here in the foothills of the Rockies.
But rain like we just had makes it much more palatable.
As crooked politicians like to say, (and are there any other kind today) “A rising tide lifts all boats.” A lame expression, I know. Their friends and donors get a lot more of the tide than we do.
The inverse of the crooked politician is also true.
Matthew 5:45, from the Sermon on the Mount, comes to mind when thinking of the uniformity of an approaching storm and the subsequent rainfall.
“He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Just or not, we should all be thankful for the rain.
It’s even better if there is a little thunder and lightning added to the mix.
The water we use out of the Wind River, or that is pumped from wells beneath your property, is good for crops unless it is high in dissolved solids, or may have a little petrochemical in it, but it can’t compare to the greening effect of rain arriving during a thunderstorm. It is Miracle-Gro from the sky.
Yes, I get excited about summer rains, heavy spring snowstorms, and periods without that persistent howling wind out of the north, west, and northwest.
We had a million-dollar gift from the sky last week, but this one came with a price tag. Gardens were shredded, some alfalfa fields looked like they’d been processed through a blender, and the guys at Rocky Mountain and High Plains Power were out all night again repairing downed lines. Heroes in a bucket truck, those fellas.
It wasn’t much on the grand scale, but it added a little more water to Bull Lake. As the more optimistic farmers say, I think we can make it if our luck holds out.
Oh well, you have the right to whine, or to be positive, either way, smile when you do it.