Time to Move the Bulls
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To start out the week, we headed up to Fred Cook Pasture to check the fence. We also turned on one of the water tanks in that pasture. Doing so didn’t take us long, which we expected it not to because we had driven by some of it before. After lunch we headed out to the State Land where we started fencing last Friday, when we ran out of staples. Last week we marked the places that needed attention to help us remember what areas needed to be fixed. That took up the rest of the day.
On Tuesday, I started out my morning with feeding the bum calf, who we have named Charlie. Then I saddled up my horse, Superman. Once everybody had their horses saddled, we set out to the bull pasture. We gathered the rest of the bulls that were left in the pasture, which was 25 bulls. We trailed them back to the house so that we could put them in the corals to work them. Each of the bulls was treated for flies and foot rot. After treatments were complete, it was time to figure out what pasture the rest of the bulls were going to go to. Eight of them were hauled up to the Middle Fork. As we headed out to Middle Fork on the gravel road, we realized that we were dealing with a very muddy road, leaving us wishing we had brought our horses.
After lunch, we got our horses ready to go again and trailed out nine bulls to the North Pasture. As we were trailing them out, we gathered the rest of the cattle that were in the Thorburn Pasture so that all the cows could be with the bulls. When we got back, we loaded up the rest of the bulls in the two trailers and hauled them to Sam’s Place. This was a longer trip because we had to go all the way around, due to not being able to take the trailers on some of the access roads. Also, because of where the cows were, we wanted the bulls to see them.
The following day was a very early morning as we left the ranch at 5:00 in the morning. It was an hour drive to our task for the day, helping a neighbor. They are a neighboring ranch to Nate. We helped them brand roughly 200 calves. My duty for the day was tagging calves that hadn’t been tagged yet. After we had lunch, at the branding, we headed into town to pick up flee beetles and the four wheeler, which had some work done to it. When we got back to the ranch, David and I headed towards the Big Pasture to put the flee beetles on the leafy spurge. We started by sweeping the plants first to see where there were beetles already. When we realized that most of the patches of leafy spurge in the Big Pasture had beetles, we headed towards the North Pasture. We put out two containers on one big patch and then found other patches along the way. The flea beetles will eat their way on the plant and then in the winter they eat the roots of the plants. It takes them quite awhile to kill off one patch.
On Thursday, it was raining again, no big surprise. We have had almost 4 inches of rain in the month of June itself. We started the morning by cleaning out the cattle guard on the home ranch. With so much rain, the runoff was just gathering in the bottom of the cattle guard. After we completed that task, we had to put a tube in one of the wash out areas in the driveway as it was starting to get really deep. David and I started gathering loads of rock and dirt to put over the top of it, while the other David was in the skid loader packing it down and smoothing it out. The second half of the day revolved around myself cleaning the tractors in preparation for haying season. I finished one tractor, but due to how long it took, I chose to wait on starting the next one.
The next day, we started out the morning by getting the bale retriever ready for the hay season. We had to take the feeder off and put the retriever on the wagon. After that was all done and cleaned up, we wrangled the horses in to get them saddled up. We loaded the horses up in the trailer and headed out to gather up the bulls out of the pasture where they were with the heifers. This was probably one of the trickier gathers that I have done. The bulls didn’t want to leave the heifers, that’s for sure; they didn’t want to go the way we wanted them to go. Once we got all 15 bulls to the bull pasture, we sorted off five of them to be taken up to the Middle Fork. We took them back to the house first because we didn’t have the trailer. On the way back to the house one of the bulls decided to lay down, he was acting fine the whole way until that point – it was a really odd situation. He did not want to get up. We decided to leave him there and trailed the rest up to the grassy lot. After lunch we were going to go treat him, but he was up again, which was a good sign. To finish up the day, I cleaned the other tractor that I had left to do from the night before.
To round out the week, we had to adjust our original plans. First, we had plans to take the bulls that were in the grassy lot up to Middle Fork, but the road that we had to take was still muddy. Then, my host wanted me to finish spraying but one of the four wheelers broke down, leaving us with one four-wheeler. The ranch hand needed the four wheeler to check cattle, so I finished up the tractor and cleaned the windows.
Submitted by: Josie Sackett
Edits by: GrowinG Internship Team
