Mud season is something that goes with living off the pavement. Ask anyone who has taken up the responsibility of keeping a house reasonably clean and habitable what mud season means and you will find out. It is an unending battle.
But this year is different. It looks now, at this point in February, as if mud season will be what winter should have been this year. We are still seeing temps that stay in the freezing zone at night, but peak above the thirty two degree frost point every or nearly every day. Additionally of course the sun is stronger every day now and even when it is cloudy the surface of the earth thaws. We have had mud since we shut down the pasture water system for the winter in early December and the cattle began walking to the heated drinker on the yard each day. They carry a coat of mud on their legs that seems permanent.
I hear El Nino getting blamed for it, in combination with ongoing global warming. This seems logical. The underlying truth of the situation of course is that El Nino is a regular pattern we know. Warming means that we are leaving behind an environment we understand and moving into one we do not.
We can guess a few things about what we are moving into. Frost, or lack of it, changes the soil at least in terms of our working with it. As the winter season shrinks compaction of the soil will get worse. Tillage mistakes are more likely to be permanent.
New weeds and pests will show up. Already I have noticed that certain pasture grasses will grow here that were formerly too southern to survive this far north. Disease will worsen and there will be regular surprises. This will be as true among us humans as it is with our livestock.
It is best to view the earth as constantly changing instead of being in a steady state. We will have to learn how to do that. It will be useful to realize that this has always been so, that what makes it so apparent now is that today's change is something our human activities have brought about. Permanence is essentially an illusion. It will be useful for those of us in charge of land use to keep in mind the strong likelihood that most of the change we have seen in farming over the last century has been in the wrong direction and to learn to ask why this might be so.
