Cow sorting

Psycho cows

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Where to even begin, it started almost like any other staycation day except I knew I had to sort cows in the evening. I am taking three in to become hamburger and steaks in the early morning. Last time we ran over the hillside for an hour until the everyone was exhausted before they would come in off the hillside. Since I was going to be doing it alone this time I figured to outsmart the cows. I brought a big bale of hay around and put it in the old ram pasture. I had to push the main herd of sheep out first. This will make it so I will need to push the momma/lambs into the barn first and then move the Y gate and push the rest of the sheep through the barn lot and into the barn. In the morning I will have to do that in reverse. Otherwise, I will get all of the sheep mixed together.

Once I had the large bale in there I opened the gates onto the hillside and waited for the cows to let themselves into the pasture! I did this at 0900 so I had a solid eight hours for them to figure out where the good eats were at.

In the afternoon I worked on getting the Gazebo wired for power. I had to drive in to town last evening and get more conduit parts. I did not have enough to make three corners. Luckily, I still had some cable lube so I could pull 12/2 wire through a half inch conduit. It does not like to make corners or 100’ without any slippery help. I was able to get all of the conduit glued and the wire pulled to a box inside the Gazebo. I still put a wet cover on the outlet box even though it’s inside the Gazebo. I have a double outlet all wired up and managed to get the rest of the ditch all filled in. I still have one outlet to wire at the brick box before I can flip the breaker back on. That won’t take very long tomorrow to get it done then there will be power out at the machine shed again.

The cows fell for my ploy! All the edible cows were in the ram pasture eating on the hay. I snuck around and locked the gates shut. The cows ran around crazily but did settle down after I left. Once I had the wiring done I hooked up the stock trailer and backed it up to the corral. I was all ready to go. I used to try and sort them and then leave them in the corral overnight. I have had a couple of escape artists in the past so I opted to wait until right before dark to sort and load them. I got them into the corral pretty easy. The five I wanted to sort off all had horns. There were ten of them and one was the largest. This is the one that jumped out of the corral last year and avoided a trip to the butcher. I was able to sort off two and then ran them into the trailer. I have a divided trailer so I shut the divider to keep them in. Next I managed to sort off the large one and two small ones. I got everyone else out of the corral and then sorted off the two small ones. The crazy big steer was in the wrong pen, it was in the further one where we had the horse trough. I tried to open the gate and get the cow to circle around and go into the chute. Damn thing bum rushed me and I had to jump into the chute myself and slam the gate closed. The cow just went crazy and jumped into the water trough and managed to get its front legs on top of the corral fence. It kept trying to climb the corral fence. I did lots of swearing and in about 30 seconds the cow got over the corral. By the time I grabbed the dog and jumped into the pickup the steer had jumped the fence again and was in the wheat field. The dog and I went to the far end of the field, she was following the pickup. It went down hill from there. The dog went for the cow and refused to be called off. We almost had the steer out of the wheat field when the dog got in front and turned it back away from the gate. I currently have a voice like a toad from hollering. Eventually, the dog went into the pickup with me but despite me trying several times to herd it back with the pickup I was unsuccessful and the steer ended up jumping the fence into the pasture with the mommas and calves.

I gave up and drove back to the house. I still had the rest of the edible cows in the back barn lot I just needed to sort off one more and I would have my three. This is exactly why I do not keep a rifle in the pickup. I was at the point where shooting the steer was a great option and fine choice. It is so infuriating. I parked the pickup and am headed to the corral to sort off one more when the two in the stock trailer start trying to jump the divider. I had not closed the back of the trailer as I still had one more cow to load. Yep, those bastards ended up pushing the gate open and running back out into the corral. It turns out that I need to fix the spring that is supposed to hold the bar that locks the closed gate in place. It is not working at all and the entire thing needs some lubricant so the spring can actually hold it closed not halfway.

At this point it is becoming a joke. I managed to sort off one more crazy horned cow and get all three into the corral. I opened the chute and got them to run down the chute into the trailer. It’s like I know what I am doing. I run down the chute following the cows so I can pull the gate closed. Nope, the last cows jumps in the trailer and then turns and tries to get out. I holler and end up having to jump out of the corral as all three cows come barreling out. I kept them in the corral and tried to get them back into the trailer. Not happening the lead cow keeps trying to climb the corral sides. I had a large stick and that just made the cow madder. I figured out that I could put the stick across the corral chute to prevent the cow from climbing out. This further enraged said cow. Finally, I just opened the gate, let everyone back into the corral then chased them back into the chute. This time I did not jump into the chute, I ran alongside it and as soon as the last cow went in I just slammed the door shut. I promptly got into the pickup and backed the trailer against the corral. There is absolutely no way to get out of the trailer now. We will leave at dark, early in the morning. I think I may have to put a strap across the back of the trailer in the morning before heading out. I think the stops at the bottom of the trailer may not be present but I cannot tell and honestly I need there to be no cows in the trailer before I explore that hypothesis.

Mr Rainman and I will be raising the corral walls another two feet next week so the crazy steer can be sorted off. This is a stupid problem to have. The horned cows we have are crazy! As soon as we wean off all the calves from this spring we are going to take most of the horned cows to the sale. It is not worth this much hassle and hazard. The polled cows we have are very mild and calm.

Lambing continues slowly

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Moonlight barn picture, phone picks up a lot of light!

The sheep are kind of having babies at a glacial pace. We have had one more single born since the twins last week. We have moved the sheep to the upper fields now and it makes it a lot easier to check on them. We can just hop on the tractor and drive up the fields all the way to the end. This is not even a slight possibility on the lower property due to the creek and fences separating the fields. I spotted the new mom when I was bringing in the sheep one night. The baby had just been born and was still warm and wet and messy. I grabbed the baby and used it like a lure to get the mother to follow me into the barn lot where we are keeping the mommas and babies.

Lamb productivity is easy currently. one set of twins, one single born to two mothers = 150%.

The child and her now official Beau are bringing us apples that have fallen off their fruit trees and we are feeding them to the sheep at night. Every evening I toss out a bunch so when the sheep come in at night they are rewarded. It is starting to pay off, the sheep are coming in 2-3 times a day to check for apples. This makes it much easier to put them in at night if they are voluntarily coming in. There a bunch of ewes that look like they are going to pop any time and several that have full udders already. We are hoping they get with the program and pop them out soon.

No one is related

I needed to match a cow/calf pair as we are selling one this fall. I spotted two cows and two calves off by themselves so figured I would get some tag numbers so it would make it easier to sell them. I was headed down to clean up field one of the old hay bales that had not gotten removed. I drove up to the cows and the calves jumped up and ignored the cows that were right there. They started to run down the fence line and all of a sudden the cows that were 75 yards away started hollering and running at the fence line. Turns out the adult cows were just baby sitters and not the actual mothers. I was able to get a picture of the mother cow with calve #24. This same person wants a pregnant cow also. So Mr Rainman and I sorted cows today.

Sorting cows never goes smoothly. I know this and yet I seem surprised when we are running the cows for a solid hour on the back hillside because the cows refuse to go down through the gate that is in the middle of the hillside. It took us two hours to push the cows into the corral and sort off two, a female cow and an eater for this year. The same person that wants a cow/calf pair wants an eater so we are hoping that by putting the eater in with the family pairs it will learn to be calm. Running with the teenagers all summer has not made any of the cows calm. We had two of them leap the fence. The fence on the hillside that we had just tightened and reinforced! They jumped it without even hitting a strand of wire. We are just going to leave them for now. They will stay outside the fence with the mommas/babies and knock down some of that tall grass. They won’t run away with the cows on the other side of the fence.

Cows sorted

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Well I seem to be a couple of weeks behind recently on the blog. After a solid weekend working I am having trouble taking the time on Sunday night to crank out a couple of blog posts. Now that we are onto daylight savings times we are doing more little stuff outside after work therefore cutting into my blog time. I will attempt to keep up, just like I say every time!

Last weekend was the great swap! We needed to move all the animals around to get ready for spring. All of the cows needed to come into the corral so we can sort off last years yearlings and calves. Our cow should be having babies in April. We calve when the weather is warmer as the Dexters do better when you are not calving in the cold. Plus, we needed to count the cows as I can never remember how many we have. The cows of course were split and we ended up having to walk all the way to the end of field one to push them down toward the corral. We blocked off field #2 and field #4A so that no cows could get into either one. We will hay field #2 but #4A is so that the weanling calves cannot reach the momma cows. They will nurse the calves through the fence unless you put some distance between them. The mommas need all of their energy and milk for the calves that are coming next month. So Mr Rainman and I walked all over the farm moving cows.

When we were moving cows through field #3 we noticed something new. There is a spring head that comes out of the ground and has been for years. It just seeped out of the dirt in a ten foot area and had several faucet sized streams. That has changed! There is now a 12” diameter hole in the ground spouting water. The water volume is about double what it used to be and the water is moving fast enough that it is starting to dig down into the ditch. It lowered the ditch water level another 18 inches since last fall. We have a pretty soft muddy area up there that is around 50’ wide already. We may have to slow the water down and let it make a bigger softer area to keep the water from running away as fast. At a bare minimum we need to get a fence around the spring outlet so nothing falls in it. We could not see the bottom.

Sorting the cows was fairly anticlimactic. Once we pushed them down behind the barn we just starting sorting them 1-2 at a time as they ran through the gate. I only got hit once in the face with the gate when trying to push a calf into the chute. Both of them got out and we had to try again. Nothing got broken and I did not even get a bruise so all was good. Once we sorted off the 13 (or 14) heifers (all but 2 pregnant maybe) we pushed them up into field #4B so they were contained then pushed all of now weaned and last years calves up to field #3. There was a lot of bellowing and hollering by all parties due to the split. We isolated the alleyway to let it grow also. I was able to use Chance to move the cows back out to the field. By the end of it she was able to work the cows without the lead. She listens fairly well but does lay down when I ask. The dogs just don’t like the words “right” “left”. It takes me longer to train them with hand signals which is usually what they respond to. I must need to come up with two new words, I just thought of them “port” & “starboard”. I may have to give it a try.

Once that was done we moved both rams into the sheep herd. We need those two to do their job! Within minutes of them entering the herd they were sniffing pee and trying to mount the ewes. Annmarie and I have decided that they get two months in with the ewes and then we are removing them. Any ewe that doesn’t get pregnant gets an ear knocked and we will work on culling the herd until we only have a bunch of calm good mother hussies. We are not going to lamb for four months any more.

Mr Rainman went out to spread solid fertilizer onto fields #1, 2, triangle and down by the schoolhouse. I worked on rewiring the entire sprayer on the Kubota tractor. The wires and switch had been getting very hot to the touch and burned the switch up. We are not sure why as the sprayer worked fine all last year. I wired the pump up with the old wire from a previous inline switch from the manufacturer. This was the quickest fix. The switch welded closed the next day and Mr Rainman had to manually pull the wires apart at a connection to turn off the pump. I have since rewired the assembly with 10g wire and installed a new switch and made a PVC switch holder from PVC pipe fittings. This lasted about 4 hours before this switch welded shut. I have since replaced the switch and ordered two 30A waterproof switches. I am hoping this 3rd fix works and the extra switches are just insurance. I have learned to have parts on hand to just be able to do the fix real time without going to the store.

The daughter says I don’t take enough pictures of myself so I decided to take a farmer selfie, enjoy!

Winter is coming

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Well Winter is definitely coming, we had our first freeze this fall. It dropped down into the low 20’s F and there is snow visible on the mountains and low foothills. We got rain instead of snow but Winter is coming. This spurred the decision to finally go and pickup the big bales of alfalfa that I had purchased this spring. My supplier holds them for me as I almost always pick them up late! I am a reliable customer so it works for both of us. I had been selling off the old small round bales from the machine shed and I managed to get the last of them unloaded and sold the day I went and picked up the large bales. I could store most of the years alfalfa in the machine shed if I had a tractor that could lift 1400# bales 14 feet into the air. But since I do not, I put 15 bales in the machine shed and they are the very last bales that I feed in the late winter/early spring. The rest go out onto the hillside in field 4b. The animals all get locked out of that field and I usually buy a big tarp and toss a lot of pallets on it to hold it in place. After buying the vinyl sign to use as a tarp and seeing how thick it is I bought two 12’x40’ signs/tarps and will lay those across the top of the large bales. I think they may even survive the winter. They should be here by the end of the week. Mr Rainman/me bent the loader support on the Kubota. It is for removing the loader and helping it be freestanding. The pull pin got displaced and the arm popped down while a big bale was getting jostled in place and it bent. The main pin had to be cut in three places to get it to let go! A 2# hammer and punch could not drive it out. The pin has spring clips so it will have to be a special order item. We were able to keep moving hay and that was the important part.

One of the things observed when we got the machine shed cleaned out was that there is a pretty damp back corner of the hay storage side. I had put down pallets last time and that worked really well to keep the hay from rotting. Years ago I had dug a trench on the backside of the machine shed and filled it with gravel to increase the drainage removal from the roof runoff. This did help quite a bit but it looks like it needs more help. Next year the gravel needs to be dug out and some French drain hose installed and then replace the gravel. I will also run the end of the drain farther away from the building. This should help quite a bit. The front ditch works wonders but I made a big sink hole for all of the water to go into and I did not do that with the back section.

Sunday we went out first thing to sort the cows. It was cold again so I put on a long sleeve shirt, knit hat, knit neck warmer, insulated carharts, large bulky quilted long sleeve over shirt and insulated gloves. I had a heavy vest ready to go but decided that I was dressing for -20F instead of 22F. I put the puppy, Chance, on a lead rope and we opened up gates to get the cows to the corral so that the bull could be sorted off. Once the bull is in Alcatraz we can put all of the cows into one herd. We can run one herd of cows until January when this years calves need to be weaned off. We will sort off the market cows and the calves and put those 11 cows down by the houses and keep the other above the house, there will be three fences and 100 yards minimum between the two herds. In reality there are a bunch of buildings and earthworks that prevent a line of sight from happening. They can still talk to each other and will especially right after we separate them. It is about 3-5 days of lots of hollering and voiced displeasure from both parties.

Chance did great once she got settled down. She wanted to sniff the hillside and find coyotes. She does not like other dogs as they are interlopers on her property. She does fine with our other border collie but not any other dog. We have not discouraged this as our coyote problem is immense and we want her to alert us if she spots one. Mr Rainman and I merely walked to the schoolhouse, had to run halfway up the hill once and then casually walk the cows to the hen house pasture. Once there we were able to separate the bull from the rest of the herd, opened the back door to Alcatraz and he went in as directed. We did not even have to use the corral to sort! I took Chance into the front barn lot and we worked the cows in an enclosed space. I let her run around with the lead rope trailing (there is nothing for the rope to catch on) and giving her commands to move the cows. She did great! I can now get her to lay down while she is mid chase on one of the cows. She will stop and drop to the ground. We need more work on her directions, left, right and circle around. The true key though is to be able to turn off the dog no matter what the circumstances, once you can do that training the other commands is easy. Once we let the cows out there were about 18 sheep that had come in still in the area, so I had Mr Rainman call Chance and work the sheep. We want her to respond to multiple people. A one person dog is great when you are the only one working the dog but having one that will listen to other people is handy. She is a true people pleaser so this fits right in with her personality.

I had shed the gloves, hat and neck warmer by the time we got off the hillside and by the time we got to the hen house I had taken off the outer jacket and was just wearing my Carharts and a light long sleeve shirt! I should have known, the rule is to leave the house with enough clothes that you are just a little uncomfortable and want more to stay warm. Work and exercise will give you the needed heat to stay warm and you won’t sweat.

We put in another gate into the alleyway from the hen house pasture. This way the animals can always get to water. The main spring on the farm originates in that pasture. We have had the gate leaning up against the fence since last year when we finished the alleyway. Now the cows will always be able to get to water. I even chained the gate open so it cannot accidentally get closed. There is one more gate still to be installed there and one small section of fence to install so that the cows can get to most of field four but not the area where we store the cow hay.

Some things continue to amaze me. We had a volunteer pumpkin grow at the main burn pile. The alpaca did not eat the plant, flower or pumpkin but the most amazing part was the plant got zero water. This summer we went over two months with no rain at one point. Annmarie made pumpkin purée and froze it today. We will be eating the rest for dinner tonight. I am going to plant several seeds around the pile in the spring! Who knows maybe this is the trick to growing pumpkins. The quail are everywhere, we have very large coveys all over the farm and we have started to keep a quail feed block out front by the old farm equipment pile. We hear quail all of the time now whenever we are outside. Heck, we even have a new pair of barn owls on the place. They have decided to roost in the large trees out front just before sunrise. They talk back and forth and are quite noisy. The coyote hunters have tried two more times without any success. They did see more coyotes but could not safely shoot them. Pretty quick we will be locking the sheep up at night and only letting them go out into the ram pasture as they will have lambs.

Cow sorting gone bad

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I was up early, ready to go out and load the steer at 0730. We had kept him in the corral for the last two day so we would not have to sort everyone. Sorting can take 2-3 hours on a good day. We had even kept the dogs in the back yard, otherwise they can get right next to the corral and harass the animals. We had let the sheep back out into our yard for one day and then I pushed them over into our orchard area. The orchard area is getting tall and I did not want them to knock the clover back down. Even though it had already grown about two inches since the last time they had been on it. It grows pretty aggressively when it is grazed on. The yard is a little out of control, the sheep may have to come back in soon so I can be eco friendly and not run the gas powered lawn mower! The trade off is you have to dodge sheep poop on your way to the front door.

The customer came with a horse trailer. It had a solid door on the back that was much wider than the opening of the chute. I figured if we backed up on one corner then got the cow in we could pull forward and quickly shut the gate. I backed him up to the corral and there was about an eight inch gap. Annmarie came out to the yard and the dogs got out, Chance was still pissed about getting rolled two days ago and just started tearing it up, barking and running the length of the corral and trying to get through the fence into the corral. She would not give it up, or listen to us. I had to catch her and Annmarie drug her off by the collar to the back yard. She listens when she is on the lead, but not off when we are around livestock. She will listen off leash now to us but now we have to get her “off” switch wired so she will drop down no matter what is going on around her. This is harder than you think to teach. It means constantly exerting your will over the little things so she learns to just obey on command. It takes time.

Cow top left of picture, me from road on tractor, not where it belongs

I had money in my pocket from the sale and we loaded the cow. It went into the trailer then I shut the chute gate so it would not get out and it spotted the 8” opening. Once it had its head through it was all over! It got stuck twice but just kept bucking and hollering and got through in about 15 seconds. I rearranged the barn lot gates so we could just push it back into the lot and try again. I went and got the tractor to shoo it back toward the now opened gates. It jumped the fence into the fallow wheat field. I had to drive down to the corner then up the road then out into the wheat field. Annmarie had to come out with Chance and open the gate out into the wheat field. I was just going to drive the cow along the fence line to the gate. The crazy cow was not scared of the tractor and I had to keep blocking the fence line with the bucket to keep it from going past me. This worked until it jumped the fence back into the main house area, Chance was involved now and then it eventually jumped the fence again into the small seven acre fallow field, then jumped back into our main pasture area by the school house. I went to go talk to the buyer while she did the chasing into the school house field.

Chance (1 year old puppy) is the white Border Collie, Mouse is the grey/white one

I gave him his money back then we discussed options. I told him that if he called around and could get a carcass cut and wrapped that 243 therapy and assistance in cleaning and skinning would be available but he was going to have to plan on a few hours to do that hard work. Damn cows! He left without a cow and us without any money. He will reach out next week after making some enquiries.

I spent the rest of the day assembling a new bee hive. We purchased it before I knew about someone else wanting to get rid of their two hives. So now we have four full hives and a bunch of extras. I am going to have to clean up an area for all the extra bee supplies. I am thinking about moving the old lamb shed and creating a clean sub room inside it. I can use an old road side billboard sheet. They are fairly inexpensive, line the entire inside of the room, seal the edges and put in an airtight door. I will have to look into this more. I have a lot of extra stuff laying around and if I cobbled it all together I think I could do it fairly cheap.