"Western Skies"

Hello again! Sorry it’s been a while but this little intern is exhausted! Mostly we have just been feeding cows and fencing. Currently, we are feeding 2500 head of cattle. Some of those are sale heifers, some replacement heifers, some bulls, and the rest are the momma cows. In about a week, the replacement heifers will be moved into a pasture so we won’t be feeding them. Once the cows start calving and things pick up, they are moved into a different pasture that is only used once a year (calving time) so we won’t be feeding those ones either. So at the moment we are feeding 46 bales a day and it takes two tractors half the morning. I am the driver of one of those tractors!!

Last week I had some excitement during a rather dull and monotonous task of burning the twine off the haybuster. You can probably see where this is going. It was a bit of a breezy day and we use a thing that looks like an electric branding iron to burn the twine off. While we are doing this, we are supposed to have a bucket of water nearby (which I did) in case of a fire. Well, one minute I am burning the twine and the next a gust of wind takes hold of an ember and starts the whole haybuster on fire! Flames went sky high! Just kidding J There was a fire but it didn’t engulf the whole haybuster. If you can imagine, I did panic a little and threw the bucket of water on the flames. Well it didn’t put them all out so of course, I panicked some more and started yelling “Haybuster fire! Fire in the Haybuster!” Then I ran into the shop and grabbed this big huge fire extinguisher in hopes that it would solve the problem. I aimed, I squeezed, and nothing. Nothing came out! Meanwhile, the fire is still burning and the wind is still blowing and I am still panicking. Purrrrfect. So here I am, running around like a chicken with my head cut off, shrieking about a fire and trying to find another fire extinguisher.  I finally found a little bitty one in the tractor, pulled the pin, aimed, squeezed, and Wha-la! The fire was put out! And the best part…no damage!

Now I’ll tell you about my exciting day yesterday. While I was feeding, I was interrupted and told that I was going up to Eagle Creek (where the heifers are) for the day to help out. It’s a bit like organized chaos up there. What more can you expect out of 600 first time mothers?  When I got up there, I was handed a pitch fork and a scoop shovel and was told to get started on cleaning pens. Nothing too exciting about that. I only had to wait about 20 minutes before a pasture rider came over the radio and said he was bringing one is that was backwards. Backwards calf = C-section!!! I have never seen one performed before so I took lots of pictures! Its really quite simple. They just got her in the chute, flipped her over, secured her legs, shaved and washed down her belly, cut her open, and pulled the baby out! I got some pretty neat pictures and the good thing was that it didn’t stress the calf out at all! Momma walked out of the OB room and baby was up sucking within 20 minutes. Just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! Throughout the course of the day, I pulled 4 more calves, cleaned many, many pens, and processed a few calves. Lets just say that I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep last night. I am not complaining though because I can’t remember a more exciting day!

Like I said, we are just feeding, fencing, and waiting for cows to pop. We only have 2 calves. Here are some pictures of fencing, and moving cows.!

C-Section Momma and Baby

Poor Lil guy had a swollen nose :(

Happy Trails!

"Party All Night 'Til the Cows Come Home"

Whew! What a busy last couple days. After a lackadaisical Sunday (probably one of the last ones I’ll have for a while), I started out Monday morning in the barn helping get the horses ready for the day. This entitles putting half a coffee can of oats in every stall and letting the horses in. Then, it’s time to direct traffic. Horse traffic that is. And the same rules (of normal traffic) apply here…get out of their way! Each horse has its own specific stall that they are supposed to go to with their name and description above it. Did I mention that there are only two colors of horses here? There is about 8 sorrels  and 3 brown ones. So there I was, trying to direct horse traffic at 5:30 in the morning. “Oh look, it’s a sorrel. And there’s another one that looks exactly like the last one, and another one.” Here are 11 hungry horses fastly walking their way into the stable barn and here I am trying to figure out who is who and where they belong. They do have slightly different markings, but everything happened so fast that first morning, it was just mass chaos. Finally, after day 3 of doing this, I think I can tell which one is which. I even have their names down!

Moving on. Monday morning we were getting ready for our all day ride. I got to ride a brown, TALL, long legged horse named Sissy. We (Sam (crew leader from Nebraska), Todd (boss), Matt (full time worker from Michigan), and I) left right after breakfast and headed out to the “NL” division. About 18 miles up the road, we picked up two more riders: Jolly Holly from Florida, and Levi from South Dakota. They are working at the Eagle Creek Division right now. 17 miles down, everyone and their trusty steeds were kicked out of the trailer at the gate of the pasture.  Then we started into the pasture to gather the cows. As we headed them out the gate and down the road, another rider joined us. Shane is the manager of the NL division and rode with us half way. Shane also thinks that my name is Julie and I didn’t have the heart to correct him. We have these little radios that we communicate on and I finally figured out he was talking to me after I heard Julie a couple times. Todd left us at this point.

I was positioned up towards the front for this ride and my job was to keep them strung out and moving. On our way down the road, we passed the mailboxes of the Williams Brothers. For those of you that don’t know who they are, let me give you a little history lesson, the same lesson that my brother had given me the day before. The Williams Brothers are the owners of the world’s largest farm tractor: the Big Bud V16-747 tractor. See, you learn something new everyday!

Back to the cattle drive. Like I said earlier, Shane left at the halfway point and that left us with 5 riders. We made it to the stopping point where the ladies would bed down for the night called “Stage Cabin”.  We should have savored the nice weather that we had on Monday and prayed a little harder to keep it coming because Tuesday was a brutal, viciously cold day.

Tuesday’s ride started out with 4 riders: Sam, Jolly Holly, Anna (the cook!) and I. The mommas were a little slower moving today but wouldn’t you be moving slow if you’d gone 17 miles the day before almost 9 months pregnant!? Instantly, frostbite set in and I’m pretty sure I lost a couple toes. Just kidding, it felt like it though. I actually felt more like a frozen popsicle that was just sitting on top of the horse. About a mile into the ride, I put on my rain slick to cut the wind. I was out in front for this ride and spent the majority of the first half babysitting the first 30 cows. They kept on stopping which halted everything behind them so eventually Sam sent me to the front to get those cows moving!  I also spent the majority of this ride walking into the wind, trying to keep my toes, fingers, and face from freezing. No such luck.  I even became desperate and walked for about a mile to regain feeling.

Eventually my group of cows got so far in front of the others, that I couldn’t see them anymore. Around noon time I was told to stop my cows and let the rest catch up. Then the pickup and trailer picked us up and we blasted the heaters in the pickup while we ate lunch. Pretty soon, the cows had caught up and passed us. And they didn’t stop! After lunch (it might have gotten 1 degree warmer), I was sent up to the front again, Sam and Holly went back to get the cows that had stopped and laid down, and Anna decided to babysit the heaters in the pickup. Sam and Holly’s cows were about 2 miles back and verrryyy slow moving. I thought about waiting for them but my cows wanted to go, so…they went! And they didn’t stop! I felt like the pied piper leading the cows down the road for the last 6 or 7 miles but they kept following so I kept leading.  Believe it or not, those cows followed me the rest of the way home and boy was I ever glad to see that final gate. I started counting them in and got to 297 cows before they stopped coming. Seems my group of 30 grew a little. About 20 minutes later, Sam came over the hill with the rest of his cows. Somewhere along the way, we lost Jolly Holly. I think someone took her back to Eagle Creek. She was telling us in the pickup that this was by far the coldest she has ever been! 394 cows and approx 33 miles later, we made it home!

It may have been long, it may have been cold, but I loved every minute of it!

Happy Trails!

"Grease Lightning"

Hey Everybody! Halfway through my blog that I was writing last night, my internet crashed and didn't save one bit of it :( so here goes, I will try to remember what I was typing yesterday!

Day 5 on the IX Ranch is coming to a close and the good news it that I survived so far! I am really enjoying myself here and am learning many new things. 

My day starts at 5:00 am when my talking, crowing alarm goes off. It takes me a few seconds to shake the sleep off and crawl out of my warm nest to turn it off. That's not all though. A few seconds later my second alarm goes off. That would be my cell phone singing the tune "God Gave Me You". I like this alarm because I get to hit the sleep button at least twice before I have to actually get ready for the day. We have to be ready and outside by 5:30 and then breakfast is at 6:00. In this half hour, my responsibility is to check the oil and fluids in 3 pickups, the tractor, the bobcat UTV, and the four-wheeler. Then I spend the rest of the half hour cleaning something or putting things away. Then it is time for breakfast that our lovely, wonderful cook Anna prepares for us. After we scarf down breakfast and thank Anna, we all head back outside to feed and put out mineral.

Feeding Cows!

Every morning I get to feed 4 different groups of cows. And boy am I glad that I started feeding at home before I came here! I want to thank Dad for being very patient with me while I was learning to back up because all that work paid off and he would be so very proud of my backing up abilities now! It takes me around 2-1/2 hours to feed 15-17 bales. I feed 179 cows in the “UPC” which stands for Up the Creek, 230 replacement heifers in the “Marlow”, 270 sale heifers in the “2^nd lot” and 271 sale heifers in the “3^rd lot”. Every other day I burn the twine off the spinning thingy inside the hay buster. The good news is that so far (knock on wood) I haven’t broken the tractor or the haybuster! Dad would be very happy to hear that because the last day I was home, while I was feeding the drive line flew off while the PTO was running full speed ahead and took out a hydraulic line which caused the back forks of the haybuster to fall and all this happened during a blizzard while I was feeding on the side of a hill. It was a messy situation (sorry Dad!).

My pretty hay windrows that I created with the haybuster

Lunch is at 12:00 and we get don’t have to go back outside until 1:00. We have been doing several little projects to get ready for calving. The due date here at the Whitcraft isn’t until the 21^st of March. There will be about 900 older cows calved out along with 400 three year olds. I am not sure, but I don’t think that I will be here when these cows start calving (who knows?) On the first day that I was here, we set up part of the calving corral and barn. We went and got all these panels and set them up to make an alleyway in front of the individual pens in the corral. Then there is this wooden gate. It gets stuck when you try and open it or swing it so it was our job to fix it. We decided that if we nailed a board from the post that the gate is hanging on to the barn, it would fix the problem. And it did! Except that I had to nail 5 inch spikes into the post and the barn and this is how it went: board, nail, board, nail, board, board, nail, board. I honestly probably hit the board more than the nail somehow I got those buggers in there. This was all while standing with one foot on the bed of the flatbed and the other on the top rung of the wooden panel. Let’s just say it got pretty interesting and I couldn’t stop laughing because I kept hitting the board.

Setting up the calving corral. This is the alleyway we created with panels and the gate at the end is the one that we fixed. We nailed a board from the barn to that post sticking up. 

Things got a little greasy yesterday when I got to help another worker with the wheel bearings. Another thing my Dad would be proud of me for: my hands were covered in grease!

Yucky....wheel bearing grease!

Today I spent the afternoon in the shop helping fix the post pounder and getting the hot box ready for the little baby calves that get chilled. I’ll put some more pictures of this clever invention up later. My boss came up with the idea of making this huge warming box that is toted around on a trailer with a fan, generator, and propane heater so that multiple calves can be warmed at the same time. I think it can fit around 6-10 calves! Quite the invention!

Who knew that fencing was a spectator sport? We had an audience while fixing fence one afternoon.

I want to end by saying that I was feeling a little homesick yesterday and as I was feeding, I looked toward home and saw those Sweetgrass Hills! I don't know what made me look over there towards home but it brightened my day and reminded me that I'm not as far away as I feel. 

Happy Trails!

This group of calves was the first ones I fed. They must not have been too hungry though because they followed me all the way up the hill to watch me feed the other cows. And then followed me all the way back down to where I originally fed them. 

Meet the calves of the 3rd lot, they are hungrily awaiting my arrival!