Spring rains bring record flooding in Ozarks of Missouri.

The farm, a month or so ago, before the historical flood rains arrived. Trees were not fully leafed out, and the stream is just a black line inside the tree line.

Last weekend, a few hours after the first storm dumped part of the 12" rain stopped. The stream is full of rushing waves and the pastures were flooded. 

This was the water's edge over a month ago (no, I do not let K9 drive!, but he loves riding and he insists he have his seat belt on before starting. The red eye glasses are for play, not vision.).

This was after a regular rain weeks ago, before the "big" storm hit.

Here is last week's 12" rain. I took this a few hours after the first wave of rain stopped, so the water level had gone down a little. Stream over flowed both sides.

Our bridge is somewhere under the water.

The intersection and bridge west of our house got flooded to a level as high as my truck's head lights - totally impassable until rain stopped and water started to recede. We came over to the bridge east of our house and the water had come up the dirt road past the gate you see in this pic. K2 was impressed.

The pond next to house over flowed a few times. The water you see running along fence below orchard was full of dead fish - 100% were small bluegill, which I'm okay with since their population is taking over the pond. I collected a bucketful of live ones to throw back in pond (don't know why other than I hate to see a living creature suffer). I did not see any bass or black crappie, but our 9 year old said he saw one of each. Not bad at all compared with the dozens of dead bluegill I saw.

A view from our back deck while it was still raining a little. The stream is normally on the left of the tree line, but...
We had State record levels of flooding all over the region. It was caused by the fact we had several rain storms over past month, so the ground was too saturated with water when this 12" down pour arrived.

I walked our pastures a few hours after the first wave of rain stopped. Another wave started up an hour after these pics, and the pond, stream and fields flooded again. We had quite a bit of debris washed up along the fence line, very similar to what we were trying to clean up before K7 left on his Mission. The fence itself survived better this time because the cattle panels we installed at certain key points worked as designed and fell down without stretching or damaging the rest of fence line. They were easy to clean off and stand back into place. With a few days of dry weather, we have already begun cutting up the bigger logs along fence and burning.

The good news is that our water gap fences survived the pounding. Yea! I am really happy about this, after all the time and money and effort of installing, fixing, and replacing the old ones.

We moved the main herd of cows into paddock #6, which had tall lush grass and clover. K6 (here) and K8 took turns going out into the rain (or breaks in the rain) every 12 hours to bottle feed our calf Annie, and take hay and grain to the two older calves we are weaning - Hollie and Tina. Look at the tiny island of green grass in paddock #4 (far left upper corner).

The pond over flowed several times. The water rushing down hill (upper left of pic) from our neighbor's long, steep driveway hammered our front yard fence so bad that the fence was almost pushed flat. The pond over flowed to the right, past the three potted trees.

But the rain finally stopped for a few days. The clouds moved on, the blue skies and sun reappeared, and life got back to normal. The pond is remaining full so far. Time to start mowing and weed eating again.

This little bull calf belongs to Flora (our first daughter out of Gwen). He is polled and red. There is not supposed to be any water flowing through this part of paddock #6.