I spent much of the spring wondering if summer would ever arrive, and she definitely chose to bare her teeth last week. Weather-wise, conditions have completely flipped from a month earlier.
Many of you were struggling to get crops in the ground from the wet field conditions. Now, I think many of you are begging for a good rain. I know they have always joked, “If you don’t like the Ohio weather, wait until tomorrow,” but this is a little crazy. I guess nothing is normal anymore.
While many of us may love the warmer weather, although not 90 degrees, it doesn’t take much to create heat stress issues for our livestock. We will often hear the weathermen report the actual temperature and the “feels like” temperature, which can often be drastically different. In the livestock world, we go by a different measure to determine when animals may begin experiencing heat related stress.
The thermal heat index (THI) is a chart that was created to factor in the temperature and humidity to create thresholds for when animals could begin to experience heat stress. I am not sure of the math behind the THI, but you can readily find a chart on the internet.