When the lights go out, where will you be?
If you’re operating an intensive livestock operation, the answer should be “out in the barn.”
Saskatchewan farmers have experienced a rash of power failures in the past few weeks due to unseasonably warm and moist weather. Fog and hoarfrost build up on power lines and on the shield wires that run above them. Eventually the weight causes the lines to sag and cross, resulting in power fluctuations and sometimes temporary power loss.
“If the problem doesn’t correct itself, it will require us to send people out to make repairs. If it is at night or if the weather is difficult then it means there may be delays in restoring the power,” said SaskPower spokesperson Larry Christie.
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Moist air and fog caused the icing and power disruptions that forced hog producer Florian Possberg to fall back on manual ventilation and small back-up generators in the Humboldt, Sask., region during the past few weeks.
“We get the barns opened up to manual ventilation and monitor things to make sure it doesn’t get too warm. The power is usually back on in under a few hours. For hogs it can be managed for a short time fairly easily,” Possberg said.
Serious for poultry
Poultry farms face more serious ventilation issues. With large numbers of birds and ventilation critical, backup generators are common.
Tim Wiens of Regina, Sask., said his family’s chicken barns rely on a pair of surplus 200 kilowatt hospital generators from New York state. They were installed by Wiens’ father many years ago.
“We were having problems with the power last week, but we are able to deal with it. We keep the ventilation working and the water and feed flowing.
“We can’t operate our feedmill (during a power outage) but in the event we ever were off line for a long period of time we’d buy feed from wherever we had to and keep the barns running,” said Wiens.
Service not questioned
Possberg said power reliability for his barns has never been an issue.
“In talking to farmers from other provinces, I feel we may have the best service in the country. The longest I’ve ever had it off in my 22 years of farming was five hours. That was in 1976,” he said.
Schools closed for a few half days in communities north and east of Saskatoon two weeks ago due to power outages, but municipal administrators said problems for rural residents were minimal because of unseasonal warm temperatures.
Rural power systems are more prone to interruption, said SaskPower, because of more above-ground lines, high winds and greater distances between supporting poles.
In serious cases of ice buildup, SaskPower uses a device resembling an oversized, tethered roller blade to shave ice from the lines. Basket trucks are used to clean off heavily coated insulators.
Freezing rain added to the frost in some areas in recent weeks, which made the work more difficult and caused more disruptions.
“If you think you are going to prevent Mother Nature from doing what she will out there, you’re just spitting into the wind. You just do your best to deal with it. There’s a lot of lines out there in rural Saskatchewan,” said Christie.
