Gathering Cows with Patience

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We started out the morning by doing little things around the ranch, such as prepping for the hay season. Our hope is to be ready as soon as the rain stops. As a typical day when gathering cattle, we wrangled the horses and headed out to the Homestead Pasture where we were moving cattle from to take them to the Fred Cook Pasture. David and I spent the afternoon hauling rock; this rock was going to be added to the driveway.

On Tuesday, we saddled up our horses and loaded them on the trailer. We headed out to the School Section Pasture, it is part of Nate’s side of the ranch. Upon arriving there, we trailed out to the pasture where we gathered around 200 pairs and trailed them to the next pasture. A unique part to this move with the cattle is we had to trail them through another rancher’s pasture. Once we arrived at the pasture, we had to pair off the cows and calves. If you don’t pair off the pairs, then the calves will want to turn and go back to where they last nursed. This took the majority of the day because of the distance that we had to cover. Once we were back to the trailers, we went out to lunch as a group. We later headed back to the home ranch where we called it a day.

The following day, David and I went into town to have a meeting with the Forest Service. He wants to figure out the rotations and other details of when we take cattle up to the Big Horn Mountain. We didn’t get as much accomplished as we had hoped due to the lead ranger being out. The guy working under her had some information for us, but not everything we needed to know. They plan to have another meeting within the next week or so. After we did that, we went and looked at brush hogs. David decided he needed to purchase one this year because some of the grass is growing so fast that it can’t be mowed with a normal lawnmower. Once back at the home ranch, I put the sprayer back on the four wheeler and set out to finish spraying. I finished the last cattle guard and I sprayed around the corrals.

On Thursday, we started out the morning by going to the Evan’s Pasture to finish some of the fence on the south side. Thankfully, it didn’t take us very long and the fence was in good shape – we sort of figured it would be because the rancher who butts up to the fence is good about going around his fence. We were both soaked from the grass when after the fencing was all said and done. Once again, when we got back to the home place I got the sprayer ready. I mixed Tordon in the sprayer. Following lunch, I headed to the OTO Corrals to spray around them. I also sprayed some weeds in the horse pasture at the home place. To round our the day, I gathered trash from the neighbors place to burn.

First thing this morning, we wrangled the horses. We headed out to the Middle Fork Pasture and gathered the pairs there. These pairs were moving to the Evan’s Pasture. Gathering the pairs today was a bit frustrating for myself because we had to cover more ground per person as we only had four of us. It seemed as though the cattle I was assigned to move were not interested in being moved today. I tried to have patience as we continued, and eventually I was able to get them gathered. After lunch, I took salt to the heifers and spend the rest of the afternoon doing little tasks around the shop. It began to rain today which limited what could be done, allowing us a more relaxed end of the day.

To round out the week we had a calm morning. It had rained 2 ½ inches Friday night so our tasks were again limited to the shop. We fixed a tire on the side by side, worked on the oiler that was broke, amongst a few other small tasks.

Submitted by: Josie Sackett
Edits by: GrowinG Internship Team