Winter returns to Idaho

Thanks for joining us—

Welcome to the Farm Bureau podcast, coming to you from my little office a block from the Statehouse…where there’s snow on the ground. I'm Jake Putnam…

Winter has returned to Idaho—just two weeks ago most watersheds in Idaho had below normal Snowpack numbers, that said,  the NRCS said we had adequate snowpack on February 1st. Then it started snowing, Boise got a foot of snow, 16 miles up Bogus Basin Road in  Boise’s northland the ski area got 33 inches of snow. Poky and IF a half foot, the mountains got hit hard. The thing is, more storms are coming, we’ve seen this trend the past few years. We’re gonna get 60 percent of our total snowpack in the next 8 weeks. We’ll have plenty of irrigation water this year. In central Idaho, they’re getting the cold weather with the snow right in the middle of calving season. All of this snow while great for reservoirs and recreation do have agricultural impacts, Stephanie Ho reports:

With all this weather, cows got to eat and in the cold a little more, feed costs are on the rise, price of hay, corn, and other feedstock has been up all winter, how’s that affecting beef production?  Gary Crawford  has been looking into that from Washington:

I was walking the Boise greenbelt and did a double-take, there were people out in the snow…surfing…in the river. In a snowstorm:

That's it for this week's podcast, For the Voice of Idaho Ag, I'm Jake Putnam