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