Going to the Sale Barn

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.

First Good Snow

Started in on the winter routine (daily chores) about a week ago, and didn't barely get 2 nice days before I had to start chopping ice! Today we had our first real good snow and I had fun taking pictures on my morning trek to pellet the calf crop and feed/water "Gimpy."

We don't have any bottle calves this year, but we've got "Gimpy" isolated for the time being while her hoof heals. I-magine she'll end up the sale barn when she can get around good again. She was a good cow and she's not that old, but she's not holding up her end of the bargain right now with no calf and a bum foot preventing her from breeding back again. All our cows get 2 strikes before they get culled, but she chose to take both her strikes all at once! Swelling in her foot is going down, so hopefully she'll make a full recovery from whatever accident she had in the pasture that caused her hoof to tear!

Here are my snow pictures for the day:

Spring/Summer Farm Projects (part 1)

I haven't kept up on the blogging well at all this year. It's almost harvest time again and that makes me remember why I started blogging 2 years ago about this time of year! So that means I have to try harder to make the time to record the craziness that happens this time of year on the farm...

One of the projects we've been working on (in addition to the regular workload of working normal jobs and keeping up with the normal farming/ranching) is rebuilding the catch pen (cattle loadout/working facility) at Jarrod's Dad's place. If you know me, you know I'd rather be out working with the boys than hanging out in the kitchen. The guys could tell you I did do some actual work on this project!

I didn't think ahead and take a "before" photo so I dug through all my old photos and found a couple that show what the crowding tub-alleyway-working chute-loadout area looked like in 2003. It was made of railroad ties and wire cattle panels and it did its job for a good long while before I started helping out I'm sure.
































(these are not my best photographic works for sure)

Now, the new crowding tub, alleyway, and loadout are finished. We still want to put a different headgate on the working chute. In the last few weeks, we've done our usual spring cattle chores using the new homemade facility (now made of sturdy pipe, sheet metal and more scrap metal and designed after something you might pay big bucks for at the farm show). We've run calves, cows and heifers through it and I think Jarrod's Dad is happy with the way it turned out. Here are a couple pictures I snapped off last night before we worked the calves and heifers and sent them all off to pasture for the summer. We are relieved that this chore is finally done! Here is what she looks like in 2009:

Peaceful chores - even on Holidays

Happy New Year! Some might celebrate the holiday today by sleeping in, but too many extra winks isn't something you can really get away with when you have farm animals to care for. I did my chores a little bit later than usual this morning, but I was surprisingly chipper this morning. I took my camera along and took my sweet time looking the animals over, rather than rushing from chores to work.

I found 7 of the 11 calves answer to my calls even when they can't see me. The other 4 missed out on the goodies this morning. Give them a little more time and they'll figure it out! I found my bottle calf is bigger than the other calves - apparently he's been spoiled with too much grass and pellets lately ;-). The ice chopping wasn't too bad this morning, but the pile of ice from the last few weeks of frozen work still hasn't melted yet despite fairly mild weather in the last week or so.

I can't put into words well the enjoyable feelings that come with doing chores everyday. It's a chance to see the sunrise everyday, see the wildlife, watch the animals, and plants and seasons grow and change slowly over time and all that is not even counting the personalities and quirks of the individual animals you see everyday. It is so much more than I can write or even demonstrate with photographs.