The clock on my night stand clicks to 4:20 AM. Time to get up. Mary kick the dogs out to do their thing and pray for no skunks. I turn on the coffee pot and we settle in to watch the news before we ‘start our day’ which is feeding horses and cattle.
When we retired, our work associates, and family all assumed we had gone insane by breeding cattle and showing cutting horses as our retirement path. Fast forward to today and they still think we are crazy.
While watching the news we talk about what we need to do during the day and who is going to do what. My wife Mary and I run the Black Dog Ranch and Cattle Company so with just the two of us there is never a dull moment and always more work to be done than one day can handle. We’ve learned to make lists, both short term and long term, of what we want to get done. These lists can include such things as getting feed and supplies, to what mammas are going to have babies and when, to what our breeding schedules are, to vaccinations, to when to move cattle to different pastures, to what horses need to be works…and the list goes on.
As much as lists and being organized is important we’ve also learned that more times than not our day will completely fall apart with some unplanned incident or issues. Thus last Saturday as a perfect example. We’d just .come out of a heat spell so the weather was now predicting a high of only 96 and cloudy. We feed all our cattle a regiment of grain every morning. This gives us the opportunity to personally check each animal to make sure they are healthy and there are no issues. We keep our bulls that aren’t breeding in one pasture, our mammas and babies in another and some ‘overflow’ mammas in our back pasture.
On this particular day we had decided we needed to go to town to get diesel and gas for our tractor, Mule, and mowers. We would do this as soon as we got done feeding, and cleaning pens and filling water for cows and horses. When we got to the back pasture, I noticed one heifer, about 10 months in age was laying down and did not come over to get her grain. Figuring out what was wrong with this heifer now became our top priority. Mary and I move her, through the brush, through the trees into our cattle pen for this pasture. It’s always a feat to get that one cow in the pen and separated from the others. I think it took us about 4 passes to get the calf in. Now it’s back to the barn to get the truck and trailer and drive to the back pasture so we can get her to the vet. I learned a number of years ago that I would much rather take a sick cow to the vet then try to self-diagnose the animal and guess my way through the myriad of antibiotics etc to get the animal healthy again. We are very blessed to have our cattle vet literally 12 miles away so a trip in is not that time consuming. I strongly recommend getting a great relationship with a good large animal, preferably a cattle specialist. They are worth their weight in gold.
Mary stays at the ranch to continue her summer project, and her passion, painting fences. I go off to the vet drop off my heifer for shots etc. She will stay a couple days so we can make sure she is well. I’ve learned over the years it’s worth it to leave the animal on occasion to ensure we don’t have to haul her back or have the vet out for a ranch call.
I get back to the ranch and it’s only 11:00 AM. Now I can get to the gym so I can ride the bike. I’ve had a hip replacement a couple months ago so this is a mandatory part of recovery. It’s really boring but necessary. I’m thankful for my iPhone and ear buds.
So as you can see, the day turned out totally different than what Mary and I had originally planned. Such is the life of a ranch family. We wouldn’t change a thing but have learned to ‘go with the flow’ and I try to keep the 4 letter words to a minimum. Oh and the weather? It rained most of the day and the temperature never got above 76. Go figure.
