Handling Yearlings

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Monday morning was spent on horseback, moving yearlings to the next pasture. Fortunately this wasn’t an arduous process — it probably took more time to get there than it did to get the yearlings to their new spot. As we pushed the cattle along, we minded the terrain and passed along jokes, keeping the mood light as the world warmed up. That afternoon everyone disseminated to individual tasks, which meant I was patrolling buildings looking for swallow nests to knock down. Lucky for me, the swallows seem to have laid off our area this year, and I only found a handful to take care of.

Tuesday morning we spent visiting all of our herds—we tagged and doctored in our two cow/calf herds, and we moved the yearlings again. That afternoon, I spent time on ranch beautification — some of the hubs have a few trees with dead branches, so I took to cutting them down. I had a chainsaw and a pole saw with me, but the chainsaw unfortunately couldn’t reach most of the branches — as a result, I got my bicep/tricep workout in for the week sawing branches down. After I got them all sawed down, I hit the rest of the muscle groups hauling them away.

Wednesday found us moving yearlings again, this time up a hill. We were anticipating a fight, but found ourselves thanking our lucky stars — they moved up with relative ease, simply following a draw to the top. That afternoon, Cade and I built as much of a buck and pole fence as we could with what we had on hand — I learned how to build wings so that a cattle guard remains impassable to cattle and permeable to equipment.

Thursday was a lot of mowing — the fishing trails have grown up again and require attention, so I busied myself with that. Happily, the tractor’s controls came back to memory pretty quickly, and I should be done with the lower section after just one more day of work.

We opened Friday with — you guessed it — moving yearlings yet again. This time I asked Cade why. The answer I got surprised me in some ways. He told me that the short moves help in reducing stress (which I figured) but also give us the opportunity to teach the yearlings how to move and react to pressure as a group. On top of that, it stimulates grass growth – by going through that quickly, the cattle get a chance to graze just a bit, causing the grass to react with more growth, but not so much that they cause the grass irreversible damage. After that, we moved on to moving the cow/calf pairs into a new pasture and then headed down the road to go recapture an escaped bull, who had made his way in with the neighbor’s cows.

Saturday was spent with John, learning how to fix gated pipelines — cattle had crushed a section, so we spent the morning repairing that spot. After that, we went down to the shop to address the bailer — it needed new pins in the belt and also needed the netting removed from it’s bearings. Sometimes hay netting gets caught up in the bearings, and if left there to build up enough, it’ll melt and seize the bearings up, causing a host of other issues.

The take-aways for the week are the importance of putting a handle on yearlings and equipment maintenance. Both prevent issues in the long run, making your life a whole lot easier as you go along. That, and the effect of practice (which is a lesson I’ve learned before, but could always use a little more pounding in). I’ve been roping after work every day as I prepare for a branding this Monday, and I’ve gotta say, my heel traps have gotten a lot better—at least on the dummy.

Submitted by: Leigh Stockton
Edits by: GrowinG Internship Team