New Mexico dairies hit hard by Goliath

The big storm which rolled through the middle of the country on Monday did a lot of damage to the dairy industry in New Mexico last weekend. Dr. Robert Hagevoort with New Mexico State University Extension says they got one-to-two feet of fine, dusty snow driven by 40-to-50 mile per hour north winds with gusts over 65 mph. That created drifts up to 14 feet tall, burying calf hutches and cow shelters. The drifts were packed so tightly, cows could walk on top of them right over fences. The storm lasted 48 hours. They are now scrambling to dig out, uncovering hutches, opening feeding lanes and other buildings. Death loss estimates have been as high as 20,000 animals but those are just estimates. They are finding that many of the calves in the buried hutches survived. Hagevoort says there were a lot of cows that didn’t get milked for a couple of days because they couldn’t get to the parlor or they had wandered-off. Adding to the problem, a number of dairy farms had to dump milk for a couple of days because the milk trucks couldn’t get through...more