Kyle Green The Roanoke Times

Farmer Donald Repair displays the mixture of hay and silage that he has been feeding his cattle this winter.

Photos by Kyle Green The Roanoke Times

Farmer Donald Repair of Rainbow Ridge Farm in Glasgow said feeding his cattle through the long, wet winter was a challenge.

Farmer Donald Repair's tractor has left deep, muddy ruts in his fields at Rainbow Ridge Farm in Glasgow.

If this winter had been a normal one, the sweet smell of fertilizer would have covered parts of Southwest Virginia by now.

It hasn't yet -- with luck, maybe by next week.

Extra moisture in the soil -- like the 5.7 inches of precipitation above normal that Roanoke received from December to February -- can be a blessing for crop growth, said Mark Alley, a Virginia Tech professor of crop sciences.

Instead, the long winter has stalled farmers and hurt related businesses.

This week, farmers would normally have been spreading fertilizer and lime on their fields, but they're waiting for fields to dry out. Soil must be firm enough to hold the weight of trucks and tractors carrying nutrients. If it's not, the tires will sink in the muck and damage the fields.

"We're about three to four weeks behind in our farming activities -- getting fertilizer on and getting things ready to go," said Jon Repair, a Rockbridge County agricultural extension agent and cattle farmer.

Reid Mackey, a poultry litter broker in Lexington, started work again this week after a long hiatus.

Mackey's Litter and Lime LLC collects droppings from the floors of poultry houses and sells the product to farms as fertilizer. The business also spreads the nutrients on fields.

"If you don't put fertilizer on a crop, your yields will go down like lard in the skillet," Mackey said. "It needs to be on now, and I'm not going to get all the work done that needs to be done. It's a whammy."

Typically, Mackey and his crew would have worked on fields one or two days each week since January, but Thursday was one of the first days he could traverse the ground while hauling a ton or two of lime without getting stuck.

"We worked the week before Thanksgiving, and the last load we hauled, the one truck sunk two feet in the ground," he said. "We have done virtually no work since that period of time."

This winter Mackey's business "suffered tremendously," he said, and had done two-thirds fewer jobs than last year.

Michael Riccioni, who runs Cloverdale Farms in Brownsburg, applied poultry litter to his fields on Thursday.

The sooner he gets that done, the sooner he'll grow hay to feed his cows.

Cattle farmers like Riccioni and Repair have used more hay and corn for feed this winter than they had expected.

"The challenge has been to get enough feed to cattle every day," Repair said. "It's nice to see these cows make it through the winter in good shape."

When temperatures drop and the wind picks up, cows burn calories quickly and eat more to stay warm.

Plus, many of the cows Repair and his son Donald care for at Rainbow Ridge Farm near Natural Bridge are birthing calves this month.

To keep the 200 beef cattle and little ones healthy, the Repairs have fed them about 300 more bails of hay and 50 extra tons of corn silage than in past years, Jon Repair said.

"Fortunately we had it, so we're in good shape, and we had enough to get us through," he said.

Not all farmers stock extra, though, and may need to buy more feed from others to make it to April or May, he added.

Still, with every snow cloud comes a silver lining.

About 4 feet of snow that buried fields this winter helped Riccioni's barley and rye, which he grows to cover soil and not to sell. The snow insulated his winter crops against the cold, he said.

But snow and an average winter temperature of 34.6 degrees in Roanoke wasn't as cozy for those who work on the farm.

"We'd been feeding cattle a year or two ago in T-shirts, and you can't wear any of that this past winter," Riccioni said. "It was cold every day. That just slows everything up for the spring."