Hi, I’m Mike and today I get a chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long
time, take you for a tour of the ranch, on Our Wyoming Life.
If you’ve been watching us for a while, you have been all over the ranch, from the
barn to the chicken house to the greenhouse. If this is your first time watching, you will
get a bit of an advantage, I think, because I can tell you when we first came to the ranch,
I was lost as could be. Of course back then there was just a barn a shop and the cows.
When we first came here there was only a couple of rental houses on the ranch, no one that
was responsible for the day to day operation actually lived here. Someone had to come out
every day, check the cows, feed and do whatever else might have needed done.
With the coming of Erin and I all that changed. We decided to live on the ranch, the rental
trailer house became our home, and eventually as our family grew we had the opportunity
to build our own house, just across the way. It is a modular so technically we didn’t
build anything but a big crane did come and drop it in place and then we moved in.
So we begin the tour at our house, only a few feet away from the shop, where most everything
starts and stops on the ranch. My day tends to start there, and end there. It’s a good
place to gather your thoughts for the day and come up with a plan of attack.
Attached to the shop is what we call the sales barn, back in the day and I’m talking 30
years ago, they used to have cattle sales in this barn. It was full of bleachers and
people would sit and watch as cows and bulls were brought up, showed and sold. Now the
sales barn is pretty much just vehicle storage, the tractors live in here, four wheelers and
sometimes the bobcat. It’s also used to store feed and during hunting season it’s
used as an area for hunters to gather, and process their game.
On the back side of the sales barn is the actual barn, right now the bottle calves are
living here, but during calving we have cows and calves in each of these corrals, some
waiting to give birth, and some bonding after birth.
Outside the barn leads you into our corral system. What can look like just a bunch of
fences and corrals is actually a well thought out and designed tool to help us sort and
work with cattle. I rebuilt our corral system in 2012 with the help of the University of
Saskatchewan who designed this system, and I have to say it works really well. Larger
corrals lead to alleys for sorting and then into smaller corrals, which then in turn lead
into tubs to move cows, bulls or calves into the squeeze chutes or onto waiting trailers.
A good corral system is invaluable, and with this system I can sort, load or work on cattle
by myself, although having a couple of extra people on hand is always an added bonus.
As we move out of the corrals we head toward a pretty innocent looking shed but if you
listen you can hear the squeals and oinks of little pigs. This is where they live, at
least as long as it doesn’t get too cold. Outside pigs are easier to manage and they
seem happier but if the weather gets too cold for them, then we move them into a corral
in the barn where we can control the environment a little better. Moving them is a giant pain
and I’m sure at some point you will see me chasing a pig around at some point, hopefully
not today. This shed, once the pigs move out will become
a place to get more vehicles out of the weather during the winter, the firetruck and usually
the smaller international tractor will fit right in here.
Turning our heads to the right and a little behind us, next to the corrals is the chicken
house. This chicken house was also build by me after we moved out here. Erin wanted chickens
and although there was an old chicken house, which has now been torn down, we decided to
build a new one. Mostly because the old one was ready to come down anyway. So we built
this new chicken house, which some of the neighbors call the chicken Taj mahal in 2009.
It does work great, expect one day when I came out and it was on fire. It was early
spring and one of the chickens had knocked down a heating light bulb that we used to
keep it a little warmer in there. That light bulb sat against the wood until it burst into
flames. Luckily, we didn’t lose the chicken house and after the fire was under control
I was able to replace any burnt or charred wood the chicken had their old digs back,
although it did smell a little like roasted chicken.
Not far from the chicken house is the beginning of Erin’s gardening empire. Her three gardens
collectively making up about ¼ of an acre or 11 thousand square feet of veggie goodness.
We keep track of them by name. This is the small garden, where Erin is growing pumpkins,
cauliflower, and some corn and this is the big garden, where Erin is out harvesting now.
In here are too many veggies to name but from fennel to kohlrabi you can find it in here.
Erin looks like she is headed to harvest lettuce, say hi Erin, or just wave, that works too.
On the other side of the big garden is the high tunnel, which houses tomatoes and peppers
and used to have all the cucumbers as well before Erin got annoyed and pulled them all
out. This fall we will be building a new high tunnel, we received a grant to pay for it
and should have the new one up and going by spring. This tunnel will become our winter
growing tunnel, where Erin will raise crops all winter long, including lettuce, spinach
and carrots. You may have noticed a two lane highway running
right by the ranch, and in fact it actually runs through the ranch. We have a land on
the other side of that road where our bulls live during the winter; the horse pasture
is also over there along with our dump and our heifer barns and calving areas. Having
a highway run through is a bit of pain, especially in the winter time, when visibility can be
low and you are trying to drive a tractor across the highway to feed bulls or horses
over there and someone is driving a white pickup with no headlights on, well you can
imagine the rest. Luckily nothing bad has happened but it can be nerve racking.
So with all the buildings, gardens, chicken houses, pigpens under our belt it’s time
to talk about what makes a ranch a ranch. And that’s land, and out here we have plenty
of it. In fact, I did some math. If the ranch had the same population density of Manhattan,
then there would be almost 500 thousand people living on the ranch. There are 5 of us.
In fact if you flipped it the other way, and took our population density and applied it
to Manhattan there would be 14 people in Manhattan. Probably make it a lot easier to get a cab.
Just like the corrals the smaller pastures are closer to the main part of the ranch.
Behind the corrals is a 3 acre pasture we call the lot, it can be used to hold cows
before sorting or to hold cows that are close to calving that need a close eye on them,
beyond that is the triangle pasture, 7 acres used mainly for the same reason but giving
the cows a bit more room and outside the triangle pasture is the home pasture. 400 acres that
is the home of the cows all winter long, they get fed here and they will calve here. Keeping
them close to home with enough room to get out and roam.
Next up are a couple of hay fields then into the heifer pasture, named mostly because that’s
where heifers spend their summer. A heifer is a cow that has never had a calf before,
these heifers are hopefully pregnant but we won’t know for sure until we ultrasound
them in a couple of weeks. Then it’s into the one legged windmill pasture,
named after this windmill that stands and supplies water for cows when they are in here.
Cows will usually spend time in this pasture as we had our next area, a wide open expanse.
Thousands of acres with very few fences but a lot of hay ground that we harvest in early
summer. After we hay it and move the hay off this is where the cows spend their entire
summer, they will live here until October when we bring them back to sort the cows from
the calves in preparation to send the calves to auction. Then depending on how much grass
is left the cows might be moved back here for they may just stay in the home pasture
and we start winter feeding. The entire ranch is roughly a mile wide and
continues for almost 6 miles before widening out in the cows summer pasture, I drive down
a couple times a day to check on or to cake the cows and you wouldn’t think that a 6
mile drive could be tedious, but trust me it can.
That’s the ranch, most of it anyway and if I missed something I’m sure we will get
to it eventually. Like I said every day starts and stops here at the shop and we are back.
I’m sorry I didn’t give you the tour earlier but as you know, there was a ton of work to
be done and we got right to it. If this is your first time here, thanks for
joining us and I hope you subscribe as we take you on a journey through life in Wyoming.
From ranching to gardening, to our family, projects and basically how we live our life.
Let us show you were food really comes from and how hard work can truly be its own reward.
If you have already subscribed, thanks for hanging with us. Lots more work on the way
as farmers market continues; soon we will bringing cows in to start preg checking, and
sorting and a whole lot more. As always, comment if you’d like, even if
it’s just to say hi, we love hearing from you.
Have a great week and thanks for joining us in Our Wyoming Life.