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It was cold – painfully cold. The kind that instantly slaps you in the face, stiffens your coat and freezes your nose hairs. Horses were hunkered under trees, cattle were grouped up along fencelines, and anything smaller, or perhaps smarter, was nowhere in sight.

 At sunrise, just a couple of days after Groundhog Day, I heard a comfortably familiar yet startling sound. Just outside the back door, 20 feet up in the bare poplar tree, two or three dozen blackbirds were chirping away as if they were welcoming May Day to the first week of February.

It was one of those two o’clock mornin’ calls: “Looked like everything was comin’ jes fine, Doc, then he got stuck. Could you come?”

We have teens in the house, so we are often hearing about common trends or funny memes. Super Puncher, anyone?

Turning on the light over the back door at 5 that morning revealed a layer of ice on everything, including the cattle trucks that had arrived in the compound overnight. Too bad a few hundred pounds of ice on the trucks wouldn’t work in my favor at the destination feedlot.

It’s been a good 15 years now since the cow that killed Christmas nearly took the entire U.S. beef export system down with it. How the industry bounced back should prove useful in tackling the next danger peeking over the horizon.