CURRENT QUARTER'S ACTIVITIES
Thank-you for your questions regarding "ranch activities". This entire website has been built for the non-rancher. With most of our world's population living in cities and suburbs, and each day becoming further removed from agriculture, the world of the ranch is relatively unknown. In addition to providing you a quality product (beef) this is our attempt to also bring a little bit of the ranch to you.
| Playing
catch-up is hard to do especially when you keep adding to the TO
DO list. Yes, the piplines in the summer range have been put in.
However the pipelines themselves precipitated additional work in
the need to place of new water tanks and enclosures to protect the
hydrants and wells from the cows. It looks like we will be staying
about a step (paddock) ahead of the cows in preparing their
pastures this summer.
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| Also
because we were facing a need to replace a large number of bulls
this year we elected to Artificially Inseminate (AI) some of our
cow herd in addition to the usual first calf heifers we
inseminate. The way we justify AI is the tightening up of the
calving period (the number of all-nighters we pull), allowing us
to use bulls which we as commercial producers could not
economically justify purchasing and hopefully speeds along the
improvement of our genetics. We prepared the cows for AIing but
contracted with a Select Sires group in the area to do the riding
and insemination.
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| As
has been typical for us we will again be contracting out the
putting up of our winter hay. We have been blessed with
uncharacteristic moisture since fall of '98. This has placed some
of our best and most strategic meadows a little under water.
However we have an excellant carryover of hay and will probably
put up an average amount of hay. A number of new yards for the hay
( to keep the cows from mid-night snacks) will have to be built
because of the additional moisture and abundant carryover.
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Soli Deo Gloria