Plowing snow, bedding calf hutches, thawing waters and so much more. Just ahead of Christmas, a powerful snowstorm hit Minnesota, dumping heavy, wet snow across the state. While a winter storm is par for the course for many upper Midwest dairies, the workload for Joe Vander Kooi of Ocheda Dairy in Worthington, Minn., quickly turned into a life-or-death rescue situation.

On December 20th, in white-out conditions and -45 windchills, Joe went out to plow some nearby roads and came upon two guys, dressed for the weather, stuck near a bridge.

“They had their hazards on and they were in my way,” Joe said. “I couldn’t get around them.”

Joe’s wife, Rita shares that this was the exact area that Joe wanted to blade off with a tractor because they know that area always gets bad.

“The guys were panicking, saying they had friends who were stuck and they had come out to help,” she said.

Unfortunately, the guys looking to help their friends misread a map and were one mile off and the friends were trying to walk to them. The locals know, including the Vander Koois, that road is virtually impassable in snowstorms.

With their car running low on gas, the couple had called 9-1-1, but since all roads were closed, the dispatcher told the couple they couldn’t send anyone out to help them. The man’s foot and leg were turning purple and the woman had momentarily passed out.

“Joe told them to get back to their car,” Rita said. “Joe got the tractor, got the people near the bridge headed back to town, and went to pick up this couple. He brought them by tractor straight to the ER and just left their vehicle where it was.”

Joe says that frostbite was something they shouldn’t fool around with and felt the best place to take them was to the closest hospital, Sanford Worthington Medical Center Emergency Department.v

Rita shared that people really need to not travel to the country when they close the highways.

“It really just isn’t safe,” she says.

Rita shares that the couple Joe brought to the ER is going to be okay.

“It just terrifies me to think how this story could have ended,” she says. “I’m so thankful that God placed their friends and Joe in the right place at the right time.”

Back at the farm, the Vander Koois are also thankful. They have an amazing crew of dedicated employees that helped their dairy smoothly operate, even amidst a snowstorm.

“We did have to dump a bunch of milk because semis couldn’t transport it to the cheese plant,” she says. “However, we have such dedicated employees and the cows were milked on time.”