A Week in the Tractor & a Day with a Shoe

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The top priority for this week was mowing paths. The ranch is fairly expansive, but it sprawls long; as such, paths along the creek side enable side-by-sides and animals to travel significantly easier and assist with routing. My job for the week, therefore, was to learn the trails and mow them with a John Deere 5205 and a brush hog.

Overall, that’s almost entirely what I spent my week doing. I learned how to manipulate a tractor (and how not to), how to guide it through thick vegetation and tight spots, and how to use the brush hog attachment, which will be the foundation for later tractor usage during haying season. This was not an uneventful process—I got stuck a couple times, I had to figure out where trails were, I was rained out, and I had to dodge rocks and trees to keep the equipment in good condition. Dodging rocks on a riverside or atop a Bighorn hill, as it turns out, is not an easy task. With five days worth of constant experience, though, I’ve become fairly confident not only in my own skill, but in the reliability of tractors — this particular model could handle terrain I figured well beyond it with relative ease.

There were a few intermissions in the mowing for the week. Twice (Tuesday and Friday), I had the opportunity to go out and tag calves, whereupon I realized that my roping was not quite so good this week, likely on account of minimal practice. Friday also brought along the chance for two new experiences: doctoring from horseback and shoeing.

We had a batch of heifers escape and cross a few pastures. As such, we went out to round them up. Once we got them where they were supposed to be (which was about a mile away from where they were, not including the detour into the creekbank underbrush), we found a heifer that had a red eye. To solve the problem, we roped her, tied her down, and then injected medicine into her eyelid that would cause it to swell shut, preventing further detritus or harm. Then, we gave her antibiotics, untied her, and sent her on her way. This was the first time I had seen anything larger than a calf doctored. The biggest surprise to me was just how well an old mare could hold her ground against a yearling heifer; under no circumstance did I think the horse would lose that battle, but I did expect her to give up a couple of steps when the slack came out of the rope. Instead, she hardly seemed to notice as the heifer ran circles while we attempted to heel her.

The highlight of the week, however, was getting the chance to put a shoe on a horse. Last summer, a coworker had been kind enough to teach me the ropes on shoeing, but I hadn’t had the chance to actually shoe one myself. On Friday, though, that changed as my host walked me through putting a shoe on step by step, giving me the opportunity to actually get my hands on it. This was something I had been hoping to learn this year, and I’m already chomping at the bit to do it more. That all said, though, you’ll have to excuse me — my roping’s gotten rusty and there’s a dummy outside calling out for practice.

Submitted by: Leigh Stockton
Edits by: GrowinG Internship Team