Check Everything

#bfrdpwy #aginternship #RightRisk

Major points that I learned over the first week were the importance of checking water, minerals, and the available forage for the livestock as well as the importance of checking on livestock and making sure that everyone looked ok, or that everyone is in the proper pastures. The reason it is so important for all of these to be major points is because of several occurrences that happened in my first week. When I went out to check the horses, I found five of them and went back and told them that the five horses looked good, but they told me there happened to be six horses.

So, the next day I went back and looked for the sixth horse. When I found him, he looked uncomfortable, had a significant amount of fat on his neck and would also not walk. We found out that he was in the early stages of foundering, which is laminitis. Another one was when we went to check cows, mineral, and water we found some calves were not in the right pasture and had been separated from their mother. So, we had to make sure that we pushed them to the fence and got the pairs back together because some of these calves had only been a week old, and it was important for them to get their nutrients and be able to bond with their mothers so we wouldn’t have a bum calf.

Some concepts that I would not really challenge in a sense but more think through a little more would be the timing of when the ranch calves. With the times that we are facing[,] ranching has become increasingly difficult. The prices of everything have gone up and the price of beef has gone down. So, from my perspective I would not calve in the early summer.

I would lean more to calving early spring somewhere around March. Why I would not calve in the summer is because when you take the calves to the sale barn, they will be significantly smaller than the other calves and you will not make as much money since they are smaller. I would rather the calves were born earlier because they will bring you more money in[,] but also because since it would be cold out; still I would have them up closer to the house so I would be able to check on them and, in my opinion, it would be better to check on them to make sure no one has any complications.

Some questions that I would bring up are how they determine the AUMs for their pastures and is it with technology[,] a range expert or just by looking out across the pasture. Another question is why did they decide to calve in the summer? The reason I would ask these questions is because I know that every ranch does things different[ly] and there are reasons behind, the way they do things so to hear the reasoning behind why they do it may clear up and help me understand their operation better.

Something that I plan on doing with all of the experience that I have gained and information I have received is to help my parents start their own ranch that they just bought. Why? Because I am the first in my family to go into the agriculture industry and study, it, so I am wanting to help my parents grow their ranch to the best it can be[,] while making the most amount of money and all these aspects that I talked about earlier go into that. Another reason is because seeing how different operations run, I can determine how[,] from what I have seen[,] may or may not work out for my family ranch and how I can change things.