The Perfect Day

Undoubtedly when you live on a ranch and have things to do outside, you’re going to get stuck doing some of it in inclement weather.  Sometimes you have the option to wait until it’s better, and sometimes you do not.  For example, if it’s going to be a  -25 outside, and a blizzard is blowing in, chances are you’ll need to climb into a Big Green Tractor, as the case may be here, and feed several bales of hay to the cows and horses.  If you’ve consigned your heifers to the sale barn for say, a November 13th sale, you pretty much have to find a way to get them to the sale.  But when you sell your calves via a video auction in the summer, well then you might get to be more flexible on the delivery date. Which was the case with us. We were supposed to ship on the 28th of October, but if you’ll recall Mother Nature kept it snowing and raining and was otherwise being uncooperative.

Yesterday however, that was NOT the case. It had to be one of the prettiest days so far this fall.

We awoke to a balmy 39 degrees. It was just cool enough you could see your breath, and there was a bit of mist coming off the river. (As an aside, sometime this winter, I plan to see if I can capture that pretty scene).  We had a big breakfast and saddled the horses, while the rest of our help arrived.

When you have a lot of help, as we did yesterday, things usually go well. The only thing my pretty mare and me had to do was slow down the cows at the front of the pack, so that we could get them bunched up going into the corrals. Otherwise when you’ve got three folks on quads, and four folks horseback, and everything already in one pasture, it’s smooth sailing to gather them up. Like they say in “The Man from Snowy River”- all you need is a butterfly net.

Once the herd is corralled, we sort off the mama cows. We did this horseback and on foot. My mare is getting so cowy and I really like it!

The cattle truck arrives:

We start deciding which calves will make the cut. Not all of them do. When you sell at video, or even at the sale barn, you want the herd to be as evenly sized as possible.  We sold our calves based on them weighing 510lbs, so you want to pull off the lightest ones so they don’t pull the average down.  For you technical people wondering how you figure out what a calf weighs and how you’ll make weight when you’re not running them over a scale in the middle of the pasture, well part of it is just a good eye for cattle, but here’s the lesser known trick- you send the truck to the scale first. Then you load your calves, and send the truck back to the scales. You get your weight per calf by doing some simple math. Viola!

These didn’t make the cut.  They’ll go next week.

Once the lightest calves are off, it’s time to count.  You can only put so many calves on the truck after all.

While they count, the boys move the loading chute.

And then they stand around and tell tall tales:

And there’s chinks. I love photographing Chinks. Someday you’ll maybe see a photo of me wearing mine!

Once all of the  boys have their lies out of the way, wait- they’re never done (just kidding. Sort of)- the cattle truck backs up to the chute so the babies can get loaded. Meantime, there are worried mama cows.

Then the babies start getting loaded into the freshly bedded down truck.

And that completes round one of shipping calves for the fall.

I hope everyone enjoyed this little glimpse into our daily life here on at our home on the range! Er. Um. Ranch!

Happy Trails-