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Cattle can take wet, they can take wind, but they can’t typically handle both at once.

So you get them some windbreaks. Typical cattle operators will bring cattle down out of the higher or more remote pastures to where they have improvements to over-winter the cattle. Above all, they need forage - lots of fiber in the forage, too, because that’s how cattle survive cold weather. Their digestion process of breaking down fiber in their food creates heat.

The trouble was, this storm was wet, it was moderately cold, and the winds were up over 60MPH. Cattle that are wet, out in the open and have their forage snowed over are going to be dead in a couple of days. They simply must have a way to get out of the wind if they’re to survive a storm like this - and then they must have some hay supplied to them in the second day, to keep them alive as the snow melts.

These cattlemen are suffering from a real failure in prediction by NOAA and their local WX forecasters. Some of them were in no way ready to bring in their herds, but some might have been able to get some hay pre-positioned to mitigate the losses.

Now, here’s a little dark humor in this situation:

It was only last Wednesday when here in Wyoming, as we were watching the Rapid City TV stations, the RC forecasters were talking about what their weather models were churning out. The RC/SD TV forecasters (not terribly excitable people, on the whole - excitable people don’t last long in the Dakotas’ winters) said that the models were predicting over 4 feet of this filthy, heavy wet cement posing as snow.

The Rapid City weather folks said that they didn’t believe the models. They just hadn’t seen the set-up in the weather patterns for 4 feet of snow, which would have been equivalent to over 4” of rainfall. That doesn’t happen over wide areas in this country.

We got about 9 to 14” of this crap over here just east of the Big Horn Mtns in Wyoming. It fairly hit the model forecasts - and here, the models have been mis-overestimating snowfall for the last five years. We easily got 1.5” of moisture out of this storm.

As the storm progressed eastwards, the snowfall kept going, and going and going. They got upwards of four feet. The models came out about right - except for the timing, which was a bit later than predicted.

Here in Wyoming, there are people hauling away trees all over the place due to how many trees got snapped in half or seriously pruned by the snowfall.