Milk Maid
National Ag Day was recognized on Thursday, March 14. For me personally, it didn’t feel like a day worth celebrating. It was a cold, very windy, gloomy day. The night before, like many people, we spent hours trying to redirect water.
We had inches and inches of water flowing into our goat barn and milking dairy cow barn. That picture on page 3 of the farm with the ever growing lake for a field is all too familiar.
I had never seen anything like that. There was just so much water everywhere, it felt like we were fighting a losing battle.
The last year has been especially trying with low commodity prices, unpredictable trade and tariff situations, extreme rain and snow totals, poor quality crops and so much more.
The past few weeks, have been just bananas. There have been many reports of buildings and barns collapsing due to heavy snow causing the roofs to fall in. We lost a couple of old barns, which weren’t a loss.
In fact, both of those particular buildings haven’t housed any domestic animals for years and they needed to come down. I was actually excited to see them go down.
It will be a bit of a pain to clean it up, but the farm will look really nice afterwards. We aren’t out of the woods yet, we have a few barns that have started to “move” and “shift” as it has been thawing and they will definitely be in need of repairs.
These building collapses have been causing a lot of headaches for everyone, but I’m hoping once everything is cleaned up and rebuilt, the landscape of the area will look nice with all the nice, new buildings.
The good news is that there is some help on the way. The Rural Finance Authority Board on Tuesday issued a Disaster Declaration for the State of Minnesota which now makes low interest loans available for Minnesota farmers whose operations suffered barn collapses or other damage due to the record winter snowfall.
Governor Walz signed a bill on Monday allowing the RFA to declare a disaster due to excessive snowfall. The funds are available to farmers for expenses not covered by insurance.
The Disaster Recovery Loan Program can be used to help clean up, repair, or replace farm structures and septic and water systems, as well as replace cropping inputs, feed, and livestock.
The program offers affordable financing to repair existing agricultural buildings to pre-disaster conditions.
Eligible farmers must have received at least 50 percent of their annual gross income from farming for the past three years and will work through their bank to secure the loans from the RFA.
More information on the Disaster Recovery Loan is on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture website.
Flooding images from Nebraska over the past few days just show total destruction and devastation that the impending local flooding may have in store for us. It’s only beginning and I believe it’s going to be a wild ride.
While it didn’t feel like there was a lot to celebrate on National Ag Day, since the beginning of time, farmers have overcome adversities with prices, weather and more and this year won’t be any different and that will be a reason to celebrate.