Wyoming Weather Always Wins

Things are looking good and manageable on May 29th, 2026!

Ecclesiastes 11:4 says, "Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap." These past few weeks have really shown us how powerless we are to fight mother nature! In late May we had a strong wind storm that ripped up the landscaping fabric, which also uprooted several corn stalks and other seedlings. We thought maybe we could handle the Wyoming weather after all...until June 13th.

We had a very brief and mild freeze overnight, but that was enough to kill ALL our plants in fields 2 (grain field) and 3 (vegetable field). The destruction was so thorough, so devastating, and so demoralizing.

It dipped down to 31.8 degrees--just enough to kill.

We took some time to grieve the loss. These three fields involved dozens of people helping out, thousands of man hours of work, and thousands of dollars invested into a successful crop. The loss hurt. After some time, we started looking at this clinically and searched for lessons learned. Here's what we came up with:

• We started too big. These three fields might not look like much, but it was almost 4,000 feet of bed space with room for 3 plants per foot--that is 12,000 plants to care for! Solution: we will reduce the field work space for next year, probably just to field 1 (perennial field).

• We didn't start with the best planting area for the plants. Because we chose to try a no-till operation this year, that meant we had to prepare the soil by hand. Wyoming's clay soil is notoriously rock hard (with literal rocks EVERYWHERE), so it was extremely difficult to turn the soil and incorporate compost. The area was uneven, which made it harder to plant seedlings and the drip tape was unevenly watering the area. Solution: we will till the area to level it out and truly incorporate nutrients into the soil.

• We didn't have a clear or organized plan. Because we had so many fields to fill, we had thousands of seedlings growing all around the greenhouses. They weren't all labeled, so we weren't even sure what we had in some cases! We weren't able to get all the seedlings planted, and several of them died because they got too big for the seedling tray. Solution: we will deliberately plant seedlings with a planned date range of when (and exactly where) they will go.

Some squash and high elevation rice

Even more seedlings!

It's too late for us to plant again for the summer, but we are already planning for fall and next summer. Will Rogers said, "The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn't still be a farmer." We are eternal optimists here at Hahn Ranch! We'll just focus on the greenhouses and the animals this summer--plenty to keep us busy.