Update

Keeping a blog going is a bigger commitment than I expected. I am doing this so I have a record of my life, and what goes on with our ranch. This year has been unusual, but really, they all are. We had a heck of a storm on May 1st, which doesn't happen too often in this country. Fortunately. It rained an inch and a half or so, then we had about a foot and a half of snow on top of that. Then a few days later, we had another good rain, and it made approx. 5 inches of moisture in a weeks time. The south end of the ranch, down around the Crow Buttes, had more rain this year than this end of the ranch. It is not generally that way, but I am pretty sure that we have had well over 20 inches of rain down there for the year. The grass is fantastic yet, and the cattle are doing very well. Yesterday we sold the lighter end of last years calves, and even though the market was lower some, they weighed well and sold good. The steers weighed 930 plus average. We have sold 4 loads of steers, and will probably not sell anymore calves this year. The rest will be weaned and either kept for replacements, or sold for yearlings next year. I hope that we can keep our markets at this level at least, or hopefully better. The last few years have been good to us and other ranchers in the US. The last thing that is happening on the ranch is that we have a new employee who will be starting work in another week or so. I hope he works out, as he and his wife seem like nice people.

Last weeks photos

Bull Day

Today is the day that will influence what our next year's calf crop turns out to be. We hope that it will keep improving steadily. Damp and cool here today, but just right for gathering bulls and turning them out to various pastures.

Sorry

I have too much going on lately to keep good updates on my blog, so it will be suspended until further notice..

Took a short trip today.

I went over to my friend George's for a little bit today. He has driven horses a lot, and is helping me with things now and then. I have driven and owned other teams, but this is the first time I have broken a horse to drive myself. So today I went on a feed run with him to see how he does things. His horses are very mild, and hardly ever step out of a slow walk. They get down and pull instead of wanting to break into a trot like mine sometimes do. I know it all takes time, and I have made a lot of progress with my horses and myself. I am not always a patient guy, but you absolutely have to not be in a big hurry with pulling horses. I have heard that horses don't carry watches, or look at a calendar, and sometimes you have to tell yourself that when you are trying to hurry things along.

Here are 3 photos from George's country, and two of the Jumpoff on the way home.

BTW, sorry I have a lot of days that I haven't entered anything in this blog, but I sure can find other things to do at times, and it takes a lot of dicipline to do this on a day to day basis.

Today

What a nice day we had today! Must have approached 40 above with light winds. When I went and did some feeding this morning, I saw another couple bucks that eluded the hunters. You might have to look close to see the buck in the first picture.

We are giving the cows some of the alfalfa that I have been hauling lately. We are feeding it in place of the cow cake we normally feed to them. (That is because of the price of cow cake.) It is nice hay, and they slick up the spot that they hay was on down to nothing. I threw a couple scenery pictures in just for the heck of it.

I am still around.

I haven't been very active on my blog for a while. I seem to have other things taking up my time, and the camera has been idle for a while. I have a lot of things to talk about that I am interested in, and sometime I will take the time to get into some of them. lol. The Primary elections are at the top of the list, and I am watching the Florida primary results in the background at the moment. I can't get too fired up about any of the candidates, but there are sure several I do not like, and would never vote for. In both parties. I am a Conservative Republican, and always will be, so most of the candidates are less than desirable to me.

On another subject, we have been selling our calves over the Western Video Market for several years, and I sent some of our ranch photos in to their ranch page. I expected them to use a few, but they used all of them. Here is a link to their page.

http://www.wvmcattle.com/photos.htm

Brrrrr!

It was seventeen below zero for a while before I went to bed last nite. This morning it is above zero a ways, but a good breeze is blowing. About all one can do on these days is remember the nice days, and hope the weather warms up soon. For the most part though, we have had a mild winter this year.

Here's hoping..............

Thursday Doings.

Maybe I sound like a broken record, but I am still working with some horses, trying to get a suitable feed team. I worked one of my paint horses a bunch, trying to get him to mellow out enough to travel out on a lose line, but he just did not want to play the game. I have found a suitable substitution for him, but now the better paint horse is giving me a few problems. The paints were broke to pull a light wagon, or buggy, (at a trot) and they cannot seem to get that out of their minds. Kind of like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. I am gaining on the better paint and his new mate, but some days I wonder???? If someone asked me if they were working out good, I would be like the Norwegian who was asked if his car blinker was working. Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes, No. lol. I have enough Norvegian in me to get away with saying that.

Here is the makeshift team, and the flatbed I built this week for my running gear. I took another photo of it, and one of my new collars. They are real nice collars that came from Iowa. I am pretty sure they were made by the amish. I did not have enough collars for these smaller horses, so I bought 2 new ones.

Cattle and mirage photos.

It had better days.

Christmas gift.

I wanted to show a photo of a gift that I made for a friend of mine. We ordered the sign out of a catalog, and I built the brand and mounted it on the pipe. It will be displayed in his yard, next to his turnoff.

Contented Cattle

Here are a few photos of our late calving cows, on winter range. They will begin calving around the 25th of April, and so far all they owe us this fall is grass and some salt. I imagine sometime in Feb., we may start giving them a little cow cake to go with the grazing. If we don't get a bunch of snow, they should have nearly enough grass to get through the winter without supplementing them with hay. That is our goal anyway.

A Sunday Drive

This afternoon a friend of mine and I went to North Dakota to see a cousin of mine who is in the hospital there. I picked him up and we headed across country on a bladed trail that may not have been a shortcut, but it was the scenic way to where we were headed. I snapped some pictures on the way, and they all happen to be taken from the grazing association that he is on. We did eventually hit a road that we made better time on, but this was the best part of the trip.

Colors

We had the most beautiful colors just before sunrise this morning. I don't know if the pictures do it justice, but it is the closest I can get.

Hay handling and feeding.

Last week I built a bobcat mounted bale spear that was part of an old frame we had around here. It is for handling the 3x3x8 foot square bales we bought. They are fed to our replacement heifer calves we have on pasture. It is great hay, and the calves love it. I am also trying to get a horse ready to drive, and he is the solid colored one you see in the one picture. They make quite the matched team, don't you think. lol.

It has really warmed up again in the last few days, and we lost the skiff of snow we had. The temps. have been over 50 F. the last three days.

A contrast.

I believe it was in January of last year, we went from this........., to this.............

The first photo is of a prairie fire which was man made, and the last is burning slash piles in the hills west of us.

It sure can change in a hurry around here.

My "Stairway To Heaven" photo

A professional photographer my not agree that this is a great photo, but here is my favorite picture that I have taken.

It was taken in one of our winter pastures last winter.