COPE, Colo. — A farmer feels grateful to be alive after he was forced to lay in a ditch when he found himself surrounded by three tornadoes Monday.
Aaron Brown told KDVR he was out finishing work in his field near Cope, on the eastern plains of Colorado, when he saw the weather around him take a turn. Brown and three others tried to drive to safety, but their truck was stuck in the sand in the field. He watched as a tornado touched down in front of him. He turned around to see two more tornadoes on the other side of his truck. The group of four ran to a dry river bank because it was the lowest and safest place they could get to.
Farmer Brown and company emerged unscathed. According to the National Weather Service, 14 tornadoes touched down in the area within 90 minutes Monday evening.
That's a lot of wind. And if you've never been to eastern Colorado - you're not missing anything.
Further down, near Las Cruces New Mexico, there's another issue: drought has left the desert sparse on vegetation, so when you've got 137 cows and 13 bulls, what's a rancher to do? Answer: you call up the local onion shed and have them deliver 40,000 pounds of culled onions. And don't stand downwind.
"It does sound like a lot of onions to 99.99 percent of the world, but to the onion industry, it's a small amount," he said. "At our facility — just the one facility in Las Cruces — every day we pack close to 1 million pounds of onions."
"They could bloat on them, if it's the only thing in their diet," he said.
But Montoya said the onions are part of a mix of feeds, including hay, that the cattle are accessing. Other times during the year, he'll feed them chile byproduct and cotton byproduct, if it's available.
Montoya gets the onions free of charge, apart from shipping costs, as the culls can't be sold at grocers. So rather than have them rot, they go into the cattle feed mix.
That's one way to moove them.
