New Cattle and RAIN!!

Over the past few days the Salatins have been buying weaned calves to replenish Polyface's stock.  We send about 7 to the slaughterhouse that is partially owned by the Salatins every two weeks.   Yesterday we received 25 calves and today we received 50.  We also had about one and a half inches of rain fall over the same two days.  

Moral of the story... If you need rain, plan on working cattle in the corral and the rain will come and make everything sloppy.

New Calf Protocol  (How do you prefer your tail pulled?)

I had always wondered what Polyface's protocol was for receiving new cattle and after the last two days I have a pretty good idea.  Both sets of cattle came from local cow/calf operations.  In fact the first 25 came from the neighbor bordering the south side of the home property.  The others came from about 30 minutes away in Stuarts Draft.  

(It was nice to get local calves since local is a huge word around here.  I heard somewhere that the average steak travels 1100 miles from birth-to-grill or womb-to-tomb, so its nice to think that some of the meat I will eat here on the farm walked everywhere but to the butcher.)

Anyway... Once the calves were sorted off their mothers and/or put into the corral, we had a series of tasks for each calf before turning them out onto fresh pasture.  Here at Polyface we run both steer and heifers.  (We have some cows that produce calves every year also, but to keep up with the beef demand they started buying calves and finishing them on grass.)  One task involves putting each calf on a set of scales to get there weight.  Then we run each calf into a head gate that holds them still so we can put in new Polyface ear-tags.  Both the bulls and heifers are pretty easy up until this point, the only difference being that we still need to castrate the bull calves into steers.  The heifers are turned loose to hang out in the coral, but the bulls are held a little longer by the head gate and a human (I had the lions share this week, but its wasn't to many).  Try and imagine this... I stood on the fence straddling the bull, both feet about belly high on the bull, facing toward his hind end.  This allowed me to pull on his tail and sit on his back while either Daniel or Joel did the castrating.  This worked pretty well under the circumstances and we only had a few that really fought what we were doing.  Once you get their tail pulled over there back, they calm down quite a bit.  In between bulls I would just climb up into the barn, over the chute and cattle to wait till the next calf.  This put me out of sight and allowed for easy access when I was needed to pull tail.

I keep saying calf but I think a different word needs to be used because some of these "calves" weighed in at over 600 lbs.  One in particular weighed 712 lbs.  Surprisingly enough, he didn't fight as much as he could have.  I guess you could say he stood there and took it like a man... or a lesser of a man now?  

This way of working new calves was a little new to me.  I'm used to having the calf either at the end of a rope pulled by a horse and cowboy, or in a head-gate with a squeeze chute.  This is how I've always castrated and tagged cattle growing up.  I can say that I prefer roping over all, and the squeeze chute is next followed by this new method.  With that said, I also respect the way Polyface does it.  All the infrastructure was low cost (home-made head gate with home-milled lumber and posts for the corral) and we got the job done right.  It's not worth doing unless you do it right.

 

Moving the Cows

Today we moved the cows at one of the rental farms, Greenmont.  

Matt and I left after chores and breakfast and drove over in his truck with some fence and a few re-bar stakes.  After we drove in the pasture Matt showed me the map Daniel had drawn us that illustrated where the cows were and where they were to be moved.  It was quite a distance and over some really nice grass.  Needless to say I was a little anxious.  Either way we went to work moving fences and preparing the future paddock for the cows and their calves.

You may be asking yourself why was I anxious?  Maybe not.  Either way, I was.  Yes, I grew up on a ranch and, yes, we drove lots of cattle over lots of obstacles, but this was different.  It was different mainly because I had never driven these particular cattle on this kind of pasture.  Since there was just the two of us Matt decided that he would go ahead of the cattle with his truck and call them and I would help steer them(no pun intended) in the right direction.  He left me at what he figured would be a troublesome spot and went over the hill and out of sight to get the cows.

He left me by a large stack of hay.  Being curious and adventurous by nature, I wanted to see the view from the top of the stack, so I climbed.  What a view!  From the top of the hay I could see almost the entire lay of land, but I still couldn't see Matt.  After what seemed like a long time I began to think something wasn't going as smoothly as we had hoped.  I had almost convinced myself that I needed to go and check on him when I saw his truck headed my way over the hill.  He was booking it and the cattle were right on his tail... gate.  I've never seen momma cows run so fast toward something (maybe away from something but never toward).  

They were running along just fine till they got to the top of the hill where they began to slow down.  I knew we needed them to keep going and not put their heads down so I trotted up to them and gave what turned out to be a final push toward the gate.  They once again ran down the hill toward Matt (no out of his truck and on foot) and into the gate.  Happy Cows!

Matt walked up with a big smile, and I'm sure I was his mirror image of happiness and relief.  We drove into the paddock, hooked up the charger to electrify the fence, put out mineral, and headed to town.  Task complete.  Check.