Oh Baby, Baby

It's officially calving season on our farm!  In the last several weeks about 75% of our cows have had calves.

During calving season we spend a lot of our time driving around through our cows looking for signs of cows in labor and looking for new calves.  A cow that is in labor will kick at the air, walk funny, lift its tail up and generally just look agitated.  Once you start to see the body language of a cow in labor you can spot it from a half mile away.  There are also certain behaviors that we watch for like laying down, focused grooming of the calf and defensive postures when we get close.  These behaviors tell us that the cow might have recently had a calf. 

If one of the cows takes too long during labor then it is our job to help deliver the calf.  If you want to know more about that look it up on YouTube.  I have a lot better things to do with your time and mine than describe that process...

After a cow in labor, our next priority is any new baby calves.  Once a cow has had her baby we give them some distance and note the number of the mother.  It is important to make sure that the calves are healthy, they are nursing and mother claims them.  If they are not nursing sometimes we have to take the cow and and calf and teach the calf how to nurse by putting the cow in the chute and showing the calf how to latch on. Who would have thought this would be so difficult...?

If everything is good with the Momma cow and baby calf, then the first thing we do is put an ear tag in the calf's ear.  We tag the calves with matching numbers of the cows.  That way we know that the cows are paired with the right calf.  We also need this later for sorting cows and calves to go to different pastures.  If the calf is a bull, we attach a castration band to turn the bull into a steer.

There are a couple reasons why we castrate our bulls on the ranch.  Bulls can be very aggressive and can seriously injure people and other cattle.  Additionally, the higher levels of testosterone in a bull causes their meat to be tougher and have less fat content.  The tastiest beef is usually the beef that has a nice mix of fat to protein.  The industry term for this is marbling.  So between having calmer animals and higher quality beef, turning bulls into steers is a no brainier.

The most cowboy part of the experience comes when we are tagging/castrating the calf.  A good Momma cow does not like you messing with her baby.  This is a good thing because it means the cow has claimed her baby and is protective but it can make your life a little interesting sometimes.  The art of tagging/castrating a calf is doing it quickly and not getting run over by a mad Momma.

When you spend this much time with your cattle you start to know them. You start to see the personality traits of each one of them.  They also get used to you and start to tame down around you.  The best thing about having cattle is helping bring new life into this world and helping it to grow.  It's also satisfying to think that we are producing food for the people on this planet and helping to sustain life here on this world.

- *OB/GYN, Baby Sitter and Lactation Consultant Ryan

P.S. - A word to the wise: If your wife is in the middle of child labor, whatever you do, under no circumstances, do play Push it by Salt and Pepper...  Yes, It sounds like it would be hilarious in your head but it is a mistake. Trust me.

*I'm not really an OB/GYN...

Farmerversary - Five

Five.  Five years. Ah ah ah ah ahhh... Sorry.  My son has taken over the television and provides us with plenty of Sesame Street entertainment these days.  My first day on the farm was March 12, 2012 and now my wife and I are running the farm.  It's pretty hard to believe it has been five years but time flies when you are having fun!

- Farmer Ryan

Cattle-ack Chrome

Cattle have itches they need to scratch too and when they decide they like a steel fence post this is what you get:

I call it Cattle-ack Chrome because they'll polish up steel until it shines.
  
-Rancher Ryan

P.S. - It's almost time for calving season!

Ugly Welds and Lessons Learned

This is an example of an ugly weld:

It was one of the first welds that I ever did on the farm, which is pretty obvious.  When I was welding my toolbox trays, I had the gun to far away from the steel plates and I wasn't making the steel flow.  That's why it looks like a pile of steel bird poo.  As a person who fights perfectionist tendencies this drives me insane to look at now.  However, I haven't fixed it despite the fact that it is in the tool box that I use every day and I look at it every time I open the lid.

The thing about welding is that it has a permanence that you don't find in a lot of things.  There is an instant though when the welder is crackling and popping and the steel is molten and flowing like that last bit of melting ice cream in the bottom of your tipped up cup.  At that point you are creating something from 2 things that will last for as long as you'd like it to.  So you can look at a weld that is a hundred years old and see the craftsmanship (or in my case, lack of craftsmanship) of the person that was welding.  You can see an instant in the past.

So why don't I just fix the ugly welds that I get to look at everyday?  I leave it because it is a reminder of how far I've come on the farm.  When I get frustrated about the fact that I'm not great at this or that I can look at a tangible example of progress and I can relax.  We all should when we are trying to do something new or hard.

 "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

-Welder Ryan

What a Year

I officially finished my first year managing the farm and boy was it a crazy one.  Commodity prices were the worst they had been in over a decade.  Every acre of corn that we planted was hailed at least once, one field was hailed 5 times.  Some of our best looking wheat was hailed as well.  Hooray!  We also had about 300 calves 150 of which came from fist calf heifers. 

On the bright side we had a ample rain to go with the hail.  So much so, that our pastures stayed green into September.  Usually the grass has died off by late July.  This allowed us to save on some protein supplementation and it helped us produce some beautiful calves.  The best part of my year was selling all of those calves for a good price (for the year) and getting complements on their quality from random people I'd never met before. 

 

I bought my first piece of farm equipment last April.  It's a 2015 Chevy Silvarado 2500 HD.  My family drove all the way to Oklahoma City to buy it.  For added difficulty points we brought our (then) 1 year old to the negotiation table.  You've never really lived until you have a toddler screaming in one ear and a salesmen trying to get you to buy a warranty in the other.

 

This year my wife and I were given an award from our county Farm Bureau.  Farm Family of the Year.  We were humbled by the fact that they though we deserved this and grateful to get some encouragement in a rough year.

 

Managing the farm this year at times felt a little like running the gauntlet but like every other year on the farm I've learned a tremendous amount.  Unfortunately, being a Manager of Chaos doesn't allow for a lot of blog writing time so I apologize to those that are still checking up on me.  In 2017 I'd like write more blogs posts and if anything just try to put up some more farm pics. 

-Farmer/Rancher/Manger of Chaos Ryan

Snow Day

Every time a farmer sees a blizzard coming through, he smiles to himself and dreams of higher yields for his crop the following spring.  Every time anyone with livestock sees a blizzard coming through they pray for it to miss them.  Being that we have livestock and farm I guess I was smiling and praying during our 36 hour blizzard last February.

We had just moved half of our cattle to corn stalks about 10 miles away from our farm when we saw the forecast for the blizzard coming in.  Most of the time when we see this type of forecast we take it with a grain of salt because the weather service tends to be wrong in this regard.  Sorry weatherman relatives and friends...  This time however the blizzard was bad; 12 inches of snow and consistent 50 mph winds with gusts as high as 70mph.

When the blizzard was going full blast and I was stuck in my house I spent a lot of my day trying to not think about what was going on outside.  When the weather is that bad there is nothing that can be done for the cattle.  We had already done everything we could trying to prepare for the bad weather and we hoped it was enough.

The day after the blizzard was over I was ready to get out of the house and inspect the damage.  So I promptly got stuck in a snow drift.  I actually figured I wouldn't make it through but how do you know the limits unless you go too far sometimes?  I was planning on using the tractor we had parked at my house to pull my pickup out of the drift but when I tried to start my tractor the belts that power the water pump on the tractor engine broke because they were frozen together.  Hooray!

The good news was that my father-in-law had three tractors and a pay-loader plugged in "in case we need them".  We plug in our tractors because they have engine block heaters that keep the diesel engine warm and it makes it easier to start in colder temperatures.  So, if you got excited about a Tesla plug in tractor we don't have one of those... Yet.  The best part of the blizzard was when we actually made it to the field with our cattle and found them healthy and inside the fence!

On March 12th I've officially been on the farm for 4 years.  I've been telling people that I've completed my bachelors of farm management and now I'm starting on my graduate degree.  This is also the first year I'm primarily managing the farm and it is as fun and overwhelming as it was when I first started on the farm.

- Officially the Manager of Chaos Ryan

One Billion...

Us humans have trouble comprehending a billion of anything and hearing that we could win a billion dollars in the lottery sounds pretty cool.  So what would a billion of something look like?  I don't have a billion dollars to show you but I do have LOTS of seed wheat.

 

Seed wheat comes in many different varieties and each variety's seed is a little different in size.  Farmers like to look at this size difference in terms of seed per pound.  The variety that I am going to use in my example is Winter Hawk.  Winter Hawk has approximately 18,000 seeds per pound.  18,000 seeds per pound times 60 pounds in a bushel gets us 1,080,000 seeds per bushel.  On our farm we have a 1964 Chevy tandem axle truck that can hold approximately 500 bushels of wheat.

500 bushels of wheat times 1,080,000 seeds equals 540,000,000.  So a couple truck loads of seed wheat is a over a billion kernels of wheat.  Being by this truck has more visual impact than just seeing pictures but now when I think about a billion of anything I think about it terms of 1964 Tandems.  So when I heard the lottery could be up to 1.5 billion dollars I thought of three trucks of wheat.

-Seed Wheat Billionaire Ryan

P.S. - Every time I wrote the word billion in this post I heard Dr. Evil from Austin Powers in my head.