08/17/2026
Our Alabama summers are usually hot, but this one has been brutal. ☀️🔥
This may look like a cute picture of Night panting like a dog, but it was actually one of the scariest moments I've had with our girls. And we've seen some stuff. 😅
She had gotten so hot that she couldn't breathe, and wouldn't drink anything to cool herself down. It took a solid 15 minutes of hosing her down with water to get her to cool off enough to breathe normally. 😮💨
We've had more weeks of having a heat index over 100° than those with our usual 90's. For the last several days we've even seen heat indexes in the 110° range, with hopes that it will finally break next week. 🤞
Just like you or me, this heat affects our animals. Because it's so stinking hot that they're not able to properly cool off overnight before the next round of heat comes.
Imagine trying to do your day job and be productive, but you're working from inside a sauna on the highest setting. And you have to stay in that sauna for all your breaks, and sleep there at night too. 😵💫🥵
That's what it's like for our livestock right now. They're so busy trying to regulate their body temperature that they can't do much else.
So, milk production is down drastically. And our hens have just about stopped laying. 😳🫣
The relief of fall weather is coming soon! 🍂🍁
But in the meantime we are:
💦 staying ontop of water troughs for all the animals
🥵 adding homeopathics to their water to help with heat exhaustion
🚿 running the cows misting system in the early morning and late evening to help them cool off
👅 giving the cows molasses to help with food conversion (many of our girls have dropped weight with the heat)
🥛 calling the girls up for milking close to dark to put less stress on them
🌬 installing fans wherever we can to help cool them during the day
I don't know that we'll ever wish it was *this* hot, but I do know we'll be wanting a little heat by January. This too shall pass, but we're fighting tooth and nail to get to the other side.
