Fall Journey

As Thanksgiving approaches this week, some of us are thinking about a journey to gather with family or friends. You may be the one making the journey. You may be the one opening your door to welcome the travelers.

Before we get ready for a Thanksgiving trip, we fill the car with gas and check the tire pressure. We try to shake the fall cold or flu that has arrived at the doorstep along with colder temperatures so that we don't share it with our family across the miles.

Our cows have been making a journey, too, but their destination isn't hours away. They are all home from summer pastures. After their arrival closer to home, they are dining at a banquet with the silage, alfalfa and sudan we've harvested this year.

But before their short journey, they needed a visit to the doctor. Rather, the doctor came to them. We had two different days when veterinarians from Prairie Vista Vet Clinic in Hutchinson came calling to give our "ladies" the once over. They got "preg checks," making sure they were carrying the next little bundles of joy that will begin arriving come February.

I want to hide, too, when it's "that kind" of appointment.

If they weren't pregnant, they got a trip to the sale barn instead of to their winter "resorts" on the County Line. We had five who traveled to the sale barn instead of to our cattle lots.

And they got their shots up to date - to keep them and their babies healthy

 

For those who've lost the ear tags that tell us their birth date and who now have the generic version, they get an extra check. Randy feels their mouths to see if any of them are a little "long in the tooth," or, in this case, a little SHORT in the tooth. We keep track of those cows. After they raise their next calves, they will be culled from the herd.

Once the doctor's appointments were complete, we loaded the cows into trailers for the short ride to their winter abodes.

Some went to graze on the sudan that Randy left standing.

As Jake and I let them off there, we thought we might not see them for a few days. (Maybe it's kind of like we humans at the Thanksgiving table, you think?)

Others went to Peace Creek. That's also the location where our silage is stored in the trench silo, but it's fenced off so the cows don't have an all-you-can-eat buffet experience.

Others took the short ride to the "round top" location, where they, too, will dine on standing sudan for awhile.

It's a good feeling to have another fall task crossed off the list. There's plenty of thanksgiving in that!

To Market, To Market

They were just minding their own business, feasting on their daily ration of silage when two 4-wheelers interrupted their morning repast.

After the curious creatures looked us over and we did a little "hey, hey, heying" and arm waving, the feeder calves proceeded down the lane to the corrals.

The feeder calves are now a little more than a year old. They were the babies born to our cow herd during the 2014 calving season. They spent the summer on pasture with their mamas, then we sorted off the babies last fall and weaned them. The feeder calves have been in a separate pasture, where Randy & Jake have been feeding them all winter.

On Monday, we sent them up to the corrals, where we sorted them into two groups - steers and heifers. (I never get any photos of sorting. It's not a job that needs a camera thrown into the mix.)

We planned to keep 25 heifers to breed back for our herd. So, after the initial sorting, Randy again looked through the heifers. He picked out the ones which had been treated with the bruccellosis vaccine. Then, among those, he chose the ones that he thought had the best characteristics that we want to carry on in our herd. He looked for heifers with a straight back, good muscling, a larger frame size, good feet, a smaller head and a feminine look. 

Those 25 went into a separate lot. The remaining 73 went back to the pasture until Wednesday morning. That's when the semi came to take them to the sale barn. Though we have two cattle trailers, it would take several trips to get the cattle to the sale barn, so we hire Darrel Harner Trucking to take all the cattle at once.

The cattle go single file up a loading chute and into the semi. The semi is divided into different compartments, which can hold anywhere from six head to 25 head of cattle. Darrel would tell us how many he wanted at a time, and the guys would send that many into the truck.

Then, they'd wait until it was time to send the next group on their way.

Once they were all loaded, the semi pulled out for the trip to Pratt Livestock.

Randy & I went to the sale barn in the pickup and were there when Darrel arrived with the semi.

Darrel backed the semi up to a chute.

The cattle came down a ramp and into a holding pen at the sale barn. Randy and a sale barn employee counted them as they came off the truck.

I stood on a catwalk to get a photo and couldn't help but think of the song from Peter Pan, "Me and my shadow, my shadow and me."

The sale barn workers sorted our cattle by sex and size and put them into different pens where they have water and feed until sale time. There are lots of pens throughout the sale barn facility. Each sellers' cattle are kept separate. 

Today, we'll be back at Pratt Livestock for the cattle sale. More on that later!

Snapshots from the Back of My "Horse"

It was time to saddle up our "horses" and gather the cattle from the Ninnescah pasture. Our horses are of Japanese descent and don't requite any hay. Instead, they consume a steady diet of gasoline.

Thankfully, the round-up happened before last week's cold front arrived. I'm just behind in telling the tale. It was an overcast day, but at least the temperatures hadn't bottomed out yet.

For the first round-up, we gathered all the pairs - the mamas and their calves born last February and March. We enlisted the help of another neighbor, C.W., who provided his own trusty steed. Randy and I were also on 4-wheelers. Jake was in the pen near the old hunting cabin, tossing hay into the air, hoping that would attract the cattle.

There are lots of places where the cattle can hide, but this time, most of them were together, and we rounded them up relatively easily.

The guys brought up a few stragglers while I blocked them from the east. One of the slow guys was a neighbor's bull. We brought him into the lot and chauffeured him back home, too.

These two were also stragglers.

We got all the mamas and their calves up in the lots by the old hunting cabin.

As usual, I don't have pictures of the actual sorting process. Trying to separate mamas and babies requires my full attention and both hands.

Once we had them separated, the mamas watched closely while their babies were loaded into the trailers.

I don't usually use an HDR treatment on my photos, but I liked it on this one.

Since we didn't have room back at the farm for the mamas yet, we let them back into the pasture.(They've since been moved, but that will be a story for another day.)

They followed the trailers to the road, where I stood guard at the gate while the guys drove the trailers out.

We stopped by the Zenith branch of the Kanza Co-op to weigh the trailers. The calves averaged 640 pounds after a summer on grass, a weight gain my handsome chauffeur was happy with.

Once back at the farmstead, we counted the calves as they came out of the trailer.

Next up on Kim's County Line, the calves' appointment with the veterinarian.