I’ve been helping my husband raise beef cow/calf pairs for as long as I’ve known him (11 years as of this writing). I’ve spent many hours alongside him feeding bales, pulling twine off of bales, putting out salt and mineral, creeping the calves (feeding extra pellets to help them grow better), vaccinating calves, branding replacement heifers, fixing fence, building new fence, digging thistles, cutting trees, maintaining windmills and keeping records. I enjoy this work and am proud to be a part of raising beef cattle for a living.
Twice a year, we load up the calves and take them to the
sale barn, hoping to get a good price for all our hard work. Calves are sold by
the pound, so the heavier the better! Calves sold off the farm will then go to
a feedyard to be fattened further and eventually made into steaks
and hamburgers to feed everyone looking for beef at the restaurant or the
grocery store. My husband and his father take much pride in the cattle they
raise. It’s a family tradition to care for cattle and raise healthy animals
that make good beef. One of the small perks of raising these cattle is getting
to take a day off work, hauling the calves to the sale barn and then spending
the day waiting to watch them sell. The sound of the auctioneer, the smell of
the cattle, eating lunch in
the café and even the uncomfortably hard seats at the sale barn all add up to an oddly delightful experience for a cattle producer.
Since Jarrod and I both work full time jobs off the farm, we
don’t always get the pleasure of spending an entire day sitting at the sale
barn waiting for our calves to appear in the sale ring. Sometimes Jarrod’s dad
is gracious enough to take our calves to the sale for us. Sometimes Jarrod
makes the trip, but I stay behind and work. I’ve been fortunate enough to be
able to work the day away in the office and still watch the calves sell by
viewing a live video stream of the auction on the Farmers and Ranchers website.
If you can’t have the real deal, this video stream is a great substitute.
I look up from my work once in a while and see a brand new
baby calf sell, or maybe a rare Hereford with horns. Most of the day, what
comes through the sale ring is black, white or crossbred feeder size calves in large
loads. After you watch about 100 head of cattle sell, they pretty much all look
the same anyway. If I keep my ears open (and sometimes if Jarrod sends me a
text message to tell me that our cattle are almost to the sale ring), I will
get the pleasure of watching some familiar cattle appear on the screen for a
brief minute, hear what a buyer was willing to give for all our hard work and
go back about my work with a contented smile. I may not have got to have my
Snickers treat after lunch at the café, nor did I get to help load the calves
on the trailer, or ride all the way to the sale barn with the cattle sloshing
around in the trailer jerking the pickup as we go down the road. But I didn’t
have to sit on those hard sale barn seats all day either.
Hopefully in a few more years, we can take baby Kaitlyn
along and share with her the sale barn experience to look forward to a couple
times a year.
