Branding

          Went to my first branding of 2020 at the ranch of my old Wilsall Ranch Rodeo Partner, Darin Veltkamp.
          Here are some of the pictures taken by my grandaughter, Taylor Veltkamp:

Veltkamp branding 2020

Ah, Straw...

          If you stop to think about it, the survival of a newborn calf is a miracle.

          After living for 9 months in a zero-gravity, fluid-filled, temperature-controlled environment with his nutrients automatically provided through an umbilical cord, a calf is suddenly and forcefully expelled onto cold, hard ground.  Within minutes he is up on his legs and searching for the new source of his nutrients – his mother’s udder.

          A human baby has a similar experience of expulsion – but he is born into another temperature-controlled environment, where he is lovingly caught in a warm blanket, and delivered directly to a breast. 

This human baby can go nowhere on his own for months!  He is carried from one place to another; picked up often and held to the breast (or a damned rubber nipple thrust in his mouth) multiple times a day; he lives indoors, and is covered by a blanket.

It is 30^o today in Montana, with 6” of fresh, wet snow.  And yet that calf hits the ground, struggles to his feet, and finds a teat.  Once he is dried off and has a belly full of milk, he is good to go.  In two days he can outrun a man afoot.

If the calf has a good mama, she immediately goes to licking off that months-old slime that permeates his haircoat, and she stands patiently while he searches up and back along her underline until he finally connects.  The job of the cowboy is to assure that every calf is successfully expelled, licked off by his mother, and finds that life-giving fluid.

But the title of this piece is straw.

Most of you know that hay is forage that has been cut, dried, baled, and stored.  It is harvested in the summer when there is an excess, and is spread out in the winter when there is a dearth.

Straw is slightly different.  It is the stalk of the plant which is harvested for grain -usually wheat, barley, and oats.  This is cut in the fall after the plant is mature and has turned yellow.  The valued part of the plant is separated in the ‘combine’.  The grain is hauled one way, and the remainder is baled up as straw.

While good hay may be as high as 15% protein, straw has had its primary nutrient package removed.  Straw is likely to be around 5% protein.  It’s not particularly good feed.

In the winter, we put out straw when the temperature drops below zero.  The cows eat it, and the inefficiency of digestion helps keep them warm.  Whatever is left on the ground helps to insulate their underside.

In the spring, we put it out for the purpose of keeping the cattle up off the cold, wet snow and mud.  The cows find it quickly.

What is amazing is that a 24-hour old calf can seek out that nice warm bed, and propel himself to it!

Ah, Spring!

          I have mentioned before that “Spring” is pretty fickle in Montana.  It can be 65 above or 10 below on any day between the first of March and the first of June.

          On the ‘official’ beginning of spring this year, it got to 55^o.  A few days later it is 30^o with a fresh 6” of wet snow.

          Last week we began calving in earnest, and cut in some 40 head of heavies to the calving field.  Today we began turning out those new pairs into a bigger field where they can maintain a more adequate “social distance” to avoid an accumulation of mud and manure, and to minimize transmission of disease.

          There were 19 pairs in this first sweep of the field we call “the rocks” into which we turn newer pairs soon after they calve.  We pushed these into the “bridge trap” to sort.  One calf needed to be caught for the application of a band to his testicles.

          I was riding the Blaze colt, from whom I have done very little roping.  He had been quite a challenge to break, and I still wasn’t certain about his reaction to throwing a lariat.  But he has settled in nicely, and handled well to catch that calf.

          One must be careful when turning out new pairs to be sure that every calf follows his mother across the bridge and into the new field.  We paired them out slowly and deliberately.  But most of the calves were a couple of weeks old, and were solidly following their mamas.

          Then we swung around and cut 14 new pairs out of the calving field, and into the now-empty “rocks” field. 

          Light snow was blowing in our face the whole time, but the temperature was hovering around freezing – not particularly unpleasant weather.  Two cows were obviously going into labor, so we pushed them on down into the calving shed.  There’s no reason for a new calf to be born into a snowbank when we have an empty shed with a nice straw-covered floor.  It’s bad enough to be rudely thrust from a weightless, 103^o environment out onto a cold hard ground, when we can temper it with warm, dry straw.

          And we elected to spread more of that warm, dry straw out into the field for the rest of the heavies.

          There had been one calf born earlier in the day up on the hillside in the calving field.  Once a calf has dried off and had a good suckle, he can stand a lot of cold.  But there was a second cow nearby.  I called Eric.

          “It’s snowing too hard to see if that second cow has a calf,” I said. 

          Eric was just heading out to throw off the late feed for those heavies.  He soon radioed back that she had a new calf.

          I rummaged around in the glove-boxes for a pair of rubber-palmed gloves, jumped on the quad, and headed down to the shed to tie onto the sled.  The calf lay quietly in the sled, is mother followed along easily, and now we had our fourth calf for the day, safe and warm in the shed.

          Ah, spring.

Too Cold for CoronaVirus

            In fact, it’s too cold for my old bones.  But the work goes on. 

            Calving is just taking off on our ranch, with three calves born yesterday. It’s 20^o today, with a cold wind blowing snow out of the northeast.  Too cold for a horseback ride – yet we did it anyway.

            Our two-year-old heifers are out in a field across the river, and these girls are the high-risk group for calving.  We needed to sort through them to bring in the ones approaching calving – a job we try to accomplish every five days or so.

            My first stop ahorseback was back to the house - where I traded my felt hat for a wool ear-lap cap, and my insulated gloves for mitts with knitted wool liners.  Then it is a mile ride out across the bridge and upriver into that wind.  (A long trot is 11 MPH; the wind at 11 MPH; total “wind chill” at 22 MPH. 

            The heifers followed the main trail down across the gulch, but pulled up short at a deep snow drift on the brow of the gulch on the other side.  The flow was disrupted as we followed them up the gulch to the road crossing. 

            We held them up in the “bridge trap”, where we cut out the ones showing “heavy” – that are likely to calve in the next week.  There were 8 in today’s cut.

            As we sorted, I noted that although most of my toes were numb, I could still feel my big toes.  I remember rides where everything below my knees was numb.  And today the ride was all within sight of the house!

            My little dog Niña abhors the cold.  She has the short-haired blue coat of her Blue Heeler father.  But she remained right behind my horse until each time I sent her out after a laggard.

           

            On the return trip to their pasture, the heifers piled on down through that snowdrift on the brow.  And the horses picked up a lope after we dropped the heifers home and turned back toward the barn.  They chose to climb back up through that snowdrift - rather than take the longer, easier way home – and we let them.

            I read in my newsfeed that most of the US is shut down.  The governor of Montana has closed the schools, restaurants, and bars.  My wife reports the shelves of the local grocery stores to be scant.

            Looking out my window, however, I see none of this.  There is food in my refrigerator, freezer, and pantry.  There are still two rolls of TP in the closet, with a roll and a spare in each bathroom.  My discard pile has enough newsprint for months more.

            The price of live cattle is down $20 per hundred-weight – but the price of “boxed” retail-ready beef is UP $20!  People are suddenly buying less from the restaurant trade and more from the grocery stores – just as they did in my childhood.

Pants-Break

          I’ve just finished reading a full-page article in Bloomberg Businessweek about the correct length of pants.

“The correct length of a pair of pants, like a well-made martini, is a question of proportion.  And like martinis, there are strong feelings about the right way to blend taste, trend, and tradition.

          Historically, a wider trouser has been worn long enough to rest on the top of the shoe, which creates a break in the fabric in front of the shin.”

          The article goes on – and on – about what was once considered to be “a good break”, and the modern “fashionable” trend for shorter “slim-fit” pants that expose even the ankles.

          I’m a cowboy.  I don’t care about “fashion”.  I care only about practicality.

         

I wear only Wranglers.  I wear blue denim Wranglers for work on the ranch, and colored Wranglers when operating incognito as a healthcare administrator and business executive. I’ve worn black Wranglers and a wool frock coat to the governor’s inaugural ball. I’ve worn black Wranglers and a tuxedo coat to a wedding.  And I’ve recently purchased a light merino wool and silk dress-coat that I plan to wear with brown Wranglers.

My pants don’t “break” – they “gather”.

Cowboys don’t wear their jeans long to make a fashion statement.  They wear them long because they spend time in the saddle.  When knees are bent to provide proper support in the stirrups, all the slack in those pants legs is taken up.  When cowboys stand upright, those jeans – which were the proper length when ahorseback – are now a couple of inches too long for the “good break” that was once demanded by “fashion”.

Trips to Town

            I make the trip to town as seldom as possible.  The ranch is on a rough gravel road that literally beats a pickup to pieces.  Every trip to town takes up an hour and a half of my time, and consumes expensive tires and fuel.  But yesterday I went to town not just once – but twice.

            In the early days of this ranch, Grandpa went to town only a few times a year.  Once in June to haul in the wool sheared from his sheep, and once in September to trail in his lambs to sell.

            In my early years as a cowboy, we went to town every month to cash my paycheck to buy clothing and groceries.

            Yesterday I was finishing up the last of the hay-stacking when a chain on my stackwagon came apart.  I had no repair parts on hand.

A call to the parts store in Big Timber assured me they had the master link and half-link that I needed. 

Big Timber is a smaller town than Livingston, but the road is much better: only six miles of gravel and sixteen miles of paved highway – a half hour driving time.  They had the parts laid out for me, but I still had to stop for fuel.

But when I started to repair the chain, I found that they had sent a #60 half-link rather than the #2060 I had requested.  The links were in plastic packages with printing on both sides, and I hadn’t examined them carefully.

I made another call to be sure they had the 2060 half-link, and it was 5:30 when I arrived back at the parts store.  Someone had put the #60 link in the wrong bin, they told me apologetically.

I was able to make the repair and finish stacking all the hay before dark.

What with meetings, town business, and parts runs, I end up in town a couple of times every week these days – even though I hate to make the trip.  But I had reason to do some work with the road department in Gallatin County a few years back.

Bozeman is the epitome of urban sprawl.  People move there to enjoy the “rural” lifestyle.  But these people apparently don’t enjoy the rural environment enough to stay in the country.  With mom and dad driving to work, and the kids in sports and dance class - the road engineers in Gallatin County figure the average “rural” family makes four trips per day to town.

I would be happier if I never had to leave the ranch.  Why do people bother to live in the country if they are going to spend all their time in town?

Spud Patch

            Yesterday I baled the hay in what my mother-in-law always referred to as “The Spud Patch”.

            It’s a small field that lays in a bend of the river under an irrigation ditch.  It represents only 1.5% of our hayland, and .01% of the ranch.  It puts up enough hay to feed our cows for only one day in the winter.  But in the early years it fed a very large family.

            The spud patch has some pretty good dirt.  And it can be irrigated from the ditch just above it.  That tiny field could produce many hundreds of sacks of potatoes.

            Those potatoes were an important food source for the family of William Elges, who homesteaded on the West Boulder River in 1896.  He went on to raise 11 children there. 

            Everyone worked hard then.  From daylight until dark they were busy plowing with horses and pitching hay by hand.  The water was carried in buckets from the springhouse and heated on a stove fueled with wood that was felled and bucked with a two-man crosscut, hauled in with a team, and split with and axe.  They burned a lot of carbs in those days!

            During the Great Depression of the 1930s much of the West was in the grip of a drought.  Times were tough.  But this little spud patch had been prolific – kept green with water that had been diverted from the river.

            In the early fall, Papa would have hitched up a horse to a moldboard plow to lift the potatoes out of the ground.  The whole family would have been scratching through the ground with spud forks and gathering the potatoes into burlap “gunny sacks”.  Those 100# bags would have been thrown up into a horse-drawn wagon for the mile and a half trip back to the home place.

            As many of these potatoes as possible were stored in the root cellar and in the basement of the house.  They were fried, mashed, boiled, and baked.  Many would have been fed to pigs and thus converted to meat.  And there were surely enough left over to sell in town or trade to neighbors.

 

            That small field is insignificant in today’s operation.  But it was a major source of ‘meat and potatoes’ to a generation now past.