A northwest Iowa rendering company kept very busy hauling hundreds of livestock carcasses during last week’s heat wave.
Tim Post, of Sioux Valley Rendering in Rock Valley, says many cattle producers lost animals due to the blazing triple-digit heat index in Sioux, Lyon and Plymouth counties.
“Five to ten head at a lot of different guys’, we had a couple guys in the 20s, they lost a fair amount of their cattle,” Post says. “For the most part, it was probably a couple hundred head in the area that I cover.”
They also had to haul dozens of hogs that couldn’t hack the heat.”There were a couple of sow units that couldn’t keep their sows cool, too, and they had a fair amount of death loss as well,” Post says. “An estimate on the sows, maybe between 100 and 150 sows total over the two- or three-day period.” Post says last week’s livestock losses from the heat and humidity were the worst he’s seen in some time.
“Four of five years ago, we had it in about that same period in mid-July, we had a humid streak and a very hot streak and it never cooled off at night,” Post says. “I remember there wasn’t much wind for a few days there, too, and the wind sure helps the cattle breathe, otherwise the air gets so heavy.”
Post says the livestock losses during last week’s three-day heat wave were the most business he’s had since he opened his rendering company.
(Reporting by Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton)