Hi I’m Mike and every day on the ranch is filled with hard work in order to bring food
to your plate and as we are now less than one week from shipping calves off to auction,
it’s time to move some cows around in order to make room for the over 300 cows and calves
that will be on their way back to the corrals in the next few days.
We have to move heifers, steers, bulls and our bottle calves to new pastures today as
we play musical cows, on our Wyoming life.
When it comes to space here on the ranch we have plenty of it, but as we get closer to
selling calves, which happens next week, well, that means that all the cows will soon be
back here at home on about 7 acres.
All 160 of them plus all their calves.
It makes for some cramped quarters.
At the moment, we have steers, heifers and bulls all right here at home as well as the
bottle calves talking up some corral space that we are going to need soon too.
So, today we get to move a bunch of cows around.
It’s kind of like three card monte.
Ya move the bottle calves here, ya shuffle heifers there, steers go over here and bulls
go in their winter pasture.
Then you move the bottle calves back over here and the heifers go in a trailer to move
to….
well I’m not even sure yet.
One thing I do know is that I planned to get some cool drone shots of me moving cows but
because we have a nice gentle wind blowing out of the west at about 300 miles per hour.
That’s not going to happen, the drone hates the wind and unless you want to see me crash
the drone in about 3 seconds, it can stay in its box.
Instead of the drone, I have a few cameras that I’m going to be moving around and a
new go pro that I’m going to wear to give you that first person perspective.
I’ll do my best, but keep in mind it’s just me out here, no help and no cameraman.
Let’s get to it.
The easiest place to start is the closest, our bottle calves, or calves that either lost
their moms after birth or their moms wouldn’t take them or some other goofy thing happened.
However, they ended up here, they are orphans, most of them were hand fed until they were
old enough to eat food on their own and rather than stick them back out with the cows where
they could get lost or confused we kept them close to home.
They have been living in this corral for the last few months but now this corral is needed
for the steers, who we will deal with in a few minutes.
The easiest place to move the bottle calves to, that is out of the way for a while is
into the barn, at least until we get done moving all the other cows around.
They are pretty docile, they are used to people moving them around and move into the barn
with little effort, although I don’t think they are too happy about it.
The steers are hanging out just outside of the bottle calves old corral which will soon
become their corral.
Steers are bull calves that have been castrated.
We don’t do it just for fun, it’s actually a very vital procedure that makes them easier
to deal with than a young and rowdy bull and it also makes them gain weight faster.
That’s important, because these steers are being raised for their meat.
Up until now they have been eating grass and hay but starting today they will begin getting
a daily ration of corn, oats and barley.
The amount that they get is carefully figured based on their average weight and over the
next couple of months the ration will be increased as they gain weight.
When they reach about 1200lbs they will be taken to a USDA inspected processing facility
and returned to us as about 500 lbs. of beef that we sell to our farmers market customers.
There are seven steers, so when we butcher our freezers will be filled with almost 2
tons of hamburger, steaks and roasts, or about the same weight as the average American car.
In the end that works out to almost 30,000 dollars in beef before expenses and if we
never sold packages or put it on sale.
A lot of work but a huge part of our business.
Getting the steers into their new corral and eating their new feed is a big step to clearing
out the corrals and pastures getting ready for cows to come home but a lot more is needed
done as we begin working with the heifers.
The heifers are all first-time moms, they were bred for the first time this summer to
a heifer bull, roughly the same age as them at about 15 months old.
After checking them by ultrasound about a month ago to find out who was and who wasn’t
pregnant they were moved into this corral.
Where they have anxiously been waiting for the next step in their lives.
After preg checking we found out that 2 of these heifers are not pregnant.
One is our daughter Grace’s, which we will be keeping to try again next year, the other
was found by ultrasound to have under-developed ovaries and will never be able to get pregnant.
She will be sold but before we can get there we have to sort both of them off of the other
heifers.
Doing so means that we have to move them into one corral then make the heifers we don’t
want to sort off go back into the other corral.
Sometimes it works perfectly.
Other times you have a cow like 80, who is one of our oldest and a pet cow try to help
but she usually ends up in the way.
But through a bit of moving and shaking you can get the heifers you need sorted off.
We are going to put them in with the steers for now so that they are out of the way, as
we move the rest of the heifers up into the loading corral and onto a waiting trailer
to move them to a new pasture, where they will spend the winter.
Keeping them separate from the other cows until after they have their calves in the
spring.
They are due about a month before the other cows and because heifers are notorious for
having complications during the birth process we like to keep them separate that way we
can devote a lot of our time taking care of them.
Once the first batch is loaded into the trailer, they are taken to their new pasture and dropped
off.
Then we go back and get the rest, releasing them as close as possible to their friends,
where they go right to work eating the new grass they have found.
Well, we are almost done, but we have saved what could be the most problematic bovines
till the last.
The bulls.
These guys have been sorted off of the cows for the last couple of weeks and have been
living out on pasture, separated from the cows by just a few fences.
Bulls are stubborn animals.
They learned somewhere along the line that if they don’t want to move, you can’t
make them.
Each full-grown bull weighs over 2000 lbs. and if pushed too hard they will start to
push back and that can make for a very bad day.
One of the techniques that I try to practice on the ranch is low stress cattle handling.
Basically, that means that you try to stress the animals as little as possible, taking
your time and being incredibly patient.
This is our youngest bull, the heifer bull, who was turned out with the cows after he
was done with the heifers.
With him you can definitely tell that he hasn’t learned the bullish way of only moving when
he wants, he’s more skittish and tends to run and move around more than the older bulls.
Call it old age or just being stubborn in their old age but you will rarely get an older
bull moving like this.
One trick that I have learned over the years with the bulls is to find the alpha bull,
just like dogs, wolves, or even elephants the herd mentality is in full effect with
the bulls.
There is an alpha bull, the one in charge and occasionally another bull will challenge
him and want to move up in the pecking order.
Bull fights can be epic and go on for hours and usually leave a bull injured or even lame,
which happened to this black bull.
He challenged our red bull, named Bubbles for supremacy of the herd and ended up going
lame on his back leg.
He now has a pronounced limp.
And because of that he will not be effective in breeding next year.
After allowing him to heal for a few weeks its evident that it’s a permanent injury
and he will need to be sold, more than likely I will end up taking him to auction with our
heifer that can’t get pregnant, so because of that he will need to be sorted off as well.
It looks like Bubbles is still the alpha bull and after getting him moving in the right
direction the rest of the bulls move along with him, from one pasture to the next and
eventually into the corrals and on to the trailer.
Bubbles is not only our alpha bull but he is also the oldest bull on the ranch and he’s
has been through this a few times and he leads two other bulls, including the heifer bull
right onto the trailer.
Once inside the trailer, pandemonium breaks out as a bull fight starts inside the trailer.
Bulls do well when out in a bigger area but the closer they are to each other, the more
aggravated they become and it’s imperative to get them out of the trailer as soon as
possible before another bull gets hurt.
Getting them to their winter pasture and out of the trailer, where everything calms down
quickly.
We still have two more black bulls to get back to the corral and after some coaxing
they begin to move in the right direction and into the corrals, where I can them split
them up, keeping our lame bull back and moving the other black bull up into the trailer.
But it’s not that easy, he doesn’t want to leave his friend.
With some patience though and light nudging he eventually gets with the program and loads
up in the trailer himself where the door is closed and he is taken to the bull pasture
with his other friends.
The lame bull is kept back and separated until it’s time to sell him, he’s fed and the
other bulls in the bull pasture also get a bale of hay to keep them occupied while they
get used to their new homes.
Back at the barn the bottle calves are let out after being cooped up in the barn and
seem to be happy about being outside once again.
Now we are ready to bring the cows home.
Next week we will be sorting off their calves, loading them on semi-trailers and taking them
to auction in south Dakota.
I hope you stick with us as we head into the payoff for the ranch, the one big payday that
makes it all worth it, from feeding all winter long to calving in the middle of spring snow
storms, haying and fencing and all the little projects that come up on the ranch every day.
Our goal here is give you an inside look at how food gets from our ranch to your table,
whether is beef, pork or veggies, there is a story behind every bite, and we are happy
to share our story with you.
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Have some great week and thanks for joining us in our Wyoming life.