Friday, March 3, 2017

2017: To Market, To Market

Who's the guy with the big smile? It's the guy who has cattle going to the sale, that's who!
On Wednesday morning, Darrel Harner Trucking came to the County Line to load our feeder calves for their trip to the Pratt Livestock sale barn. On Tuesday, we had sorted the calves we planned to sell from the 25 heifers we will keep at home to add to our cow-calf herd.
Though we have two farm-sized cattle trailers, it would take several trips to get all the cattle to the sale barn, so we hire Darrel Harner Trucking to haul them in one 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.
The cattle go single file up a loading chute and into the semi.
Once they were all loaded, the semi pulled out for the trip to Pratt Livestock.   

Some years, they haven't all fit on the semi, so we've had to haul one farm trailer load to Pratt.
 
But this year, with all the cattle on the truck, I requested a few extra photo opportunities. (Big surprise, right?!)
I wanted to get a photo of the truck going down Main Street of Stafford.  
Randy wanted me to get one of the semi going by the bank. (You can see the bank sign on the right in the photo above.) Once we get the sale barn check, it goes directly to the bank to help pay down our operating loan.This picture is the very definition of irony!
We still beat the semi to the sale barn with a little cross-country driving!
 
Once the semi arrived, the sale barn workers helped Darrel back it up to the unloading chute.
 
The cattle came off the truck into a pen. 
 
Once they were all unloaded, the sale barn workers sorted our cattle by sex and size and put them into different pens where they had water and feed until sale time. There are lots of pens throughout the sale barn facility. Each sellers' cattle are kept separate.
Next up on the blog: Sale day!

2 comments:

  1. 1. I hadn't seen this Irish saying before even with my husband's Irish relatives. I love it.
    2. Just a little laughter as you got your street photos. Did the drivers give you a hard time or do they all know now, what ti expect?
    3. I hope the sale goes well.

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    Replies
    1. Darrel is our annual trucker, so he has become acquainted with my picture-taking proclivities. Randy made the comment when I got back in the pickup on Stafford Main Street that Darrel probably was laughing at me. And that's OK. I'll laugh at me, too! I'll have a post about the sale results on Monday.

      I like Irish blessings, and since St. Patty's Day is around the corner, I decided to change the blog header. As I mentioned in the caption, we no longer have this view, since the barn and the granary were torn down this year. But it's still a favorite photo, since the rainbow was so vivid.

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