The Idaho Rancher's Wife

The Ranch From the Wife's Perspective

Its All About a Bunch of Bull

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Bull sale season is coming to a close.  It ends just as fast as it comes.  I kind of have a love hate relationship with Bull Sale season.  I love it when I get a chance to go, but I hate it when I get left behind.  And unfortunately, with all of my other OTHER responsibilities, it happens more than I’d like.  But I usually try to send a child or two if that’s the case (hahaha… hehehe…).  My mother-in-law and I were having a great conversation the other night, talking about all the pros and woes of being a rancher’s wife during Bull Sale Season.  I’m sure that we aren’t the only ones that have noticed the ups and downs that come Bull Sale Season.  In fact, I’m sure that we have it easy compared the wives of the ranchers PUTTING ON the sale.

I’ve actually had the pleasure of both sides of the sale- the selling and the buying.  Growing up I loved the prep work of a sale.  Trimming everything, photographing them all, sprucing up the sale barn, staying home from school on sale day…  Yep, it was a kids dream.  But I’m sure as the wife to a rancher, my mom didn’t think it was quite so awesome.  When I imagine her at that time of the year, one word comes to mind- STRESSED!

Even though I am on the buying side of the bull sale now, I still love it.  There is such an energy at a cattle auction!  The combination of the noisy crowd, the feisty bulls, the auctioneer’s ramble, and the anticipation of when to put in your bid gives the air a little extra zing.  You can’t help but love it, right?!

While the debate of whether Bull Sale Season is an actual thing is still being decided, I have unofficially dubbed March, plus or minus a few weeks, as such.  If you were to come look at our bull-sale-calendar, you might mistake it for a bingo card for as many days as have been scribbled on.  In fact you might even think we were going for Black Out!  And while there may be so many to go to, you can be sure that every one will be different and every one will be good.

The obvious upside to having so many days out to a bull sale is that I get a free pass on fixing lunch for those days.  While we can always expect the sale to be great, we KNOW the meal will be even greater!  In fact, it may be so good and we come home so full, that I might not even have to make dinner (actually that’s never happened, but every time I’m hopeful!).  Is it bad to admit that I have even asked for a recipe or two after watching my family down their lunch?  I figure its a great compliment!

Once you get to the sale and have a chance to look around, you realize that ranchers can actually dress up and they are a pretty darn good looking crowd.  You spend so much time seeing them in shirts torn up from the barbed wire or pants covered in what looks like tractor oil and grease (and maybe even something else you can’t even recognize!), or boots smeared in mud and manure and stinking even worse than they look, that you forget how good looking a rancher can be.  And I think they will take any chance to get out of their grubby clothes too!  Maybe that’s why we hit up so many sales….  Hmmm….

I’ve decided that there is an art to bidding.  You don’t want to jump in too soon, because that just might take the price right out of your budget.  But you don’t want to get in the action too late because then you might be out altogether before you even got in.  Unless you can manage the sneak attack and steal the show with a last second bid.  Then there is the whole other ballgame of bidding online.  That one really makes me nervous… What if the connection goes out all of the sudden or what if it takes a second longer to register the bid or what if …. something else could go wrong, I’m sure! 
Whatever way you bid, you gotta have a game plan!

Usually we go to a sale with a budget in mind and a number of how many bulls we need to buy.  I always figure that once we spend the money or we get all the bulls we need, we will head home.  But the truth of the matter is, a bull sale is a rancher’s social hour.  Believe it or not, ranchers to like to gab!  They all hurry up to buy their bulls and then hustle over to the cookie table to chat away the rest of the sale.

At the heart of every bull sale is their bull magazine. You can ALWAYS know it is Bull Sale Season by the stack of magazines on the desk.  I wonder if the mail man gets tired of filling the mail box up with them?  We’ve seen a few ranches that REALLY want you to come, so they send 2 or 3 magazines to be sure you get a good look at what they’ve got.  It makes things easier for The Rancher when there are more, though.  He can leave one on the kitchen table to read while he eats, one on the night stand to have his final look before he goes to sleep, and one in the bathroom where he does his best thinking.  For some ranches, they send out the whole sale lineup.  They figure then you can come to the sale knowing exactly what you want to go home with.  For other ranches it is more like a ranch-and-family-year book.  They try pulling at your heart strings a bit with those sweet smiling grandbabies.  Then there are the ranches that just send their own type of save-the-date card and figure its gonna save them a lot of work if you just grab the magazine as you walk through the bulls. 

But without those magazines, a rancher would be lost keeping everyone and everything straight.  Besides the fancy names and photos, they are full of the info any rancher needs to get a good buy.  Its those EPDs.  If anyone ever thought that rancher wasn’t an educated guy, he should try his hand at EPDs…  I’m slowing starting to gather what scores are good birth weights, weaning weights, milking and futures.  I have no idea how they figured them, but I believe them.

Well,  Bull Sale Season… its been real, its been fun, and no we are done.  Its just a little more than a month away until the real fun starts and we see just how good of a buy we made!  Until next year… (Maybe the season will be official then and we can have an opening day celebration!)

PS-  I think the life of a bull is rough… Seriously, who else has a job of pleasure that only has to work a few months of the year and then is literally put out to pasture for the rest of the year?!  And to have pasture like we did last spring…  Yum…

Test Day on the Ranch

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Spring is in the air and we are doing spring things on the ranch.  Field work, taking care of new babies, semen testing bulls…

Oh, what?  Testing bulls isn’t part of you think of spring time?  I know, I’ve been ruined…  Its funny the ways that ranch life has influenced my thinking.  But yes, when I think about testing bulls and going to bull sales, I feel like spring is in the air.

Testing bulls was as exciting as usual this year.  We teased Rancher Sr. about his fun running the torpedo and I took a look or two in the microscope.  This year we had Dr. Philip come out to do the testing.  The fun about this is that he was actually The Rancher’s roommate from college.  That means I get to learn a little dirt on my cowboy.  I won’t tell you those things… they aren’t blog-o-sphere appropriate… Actually I’m sure that I would be dead if ever I mentioned those secrets from the Dr.

As weird as it may be, I love test day.  I love the medical side of ranching just as much as the daily chores.  There is so much that they are looking for when they test- how many swimmers there are in each squirt of semen and how many of those swimmers are good and viable.  They measure the scrotal circumference and of course test for Trich. 

What a wonderful spring day it was with the good folks from the Bear River Animal Hospital.  We heard some great stories, learned some new things and got some important work done.  Although, I guess it may be somewhat of an awkward day, at least for the man running the torpedo! 

Hometown Buck-a-Rama

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If I had known all of the crazy things that September would bring I don’t know that I would have believed it.  My calendar at the end of the month looks nothing like what I had in mind at the beginning of the month.  But that’s ok… In the midst of all the craziness I had some awesome family time, a fun trip to Montana with my sister (she lives in New York… like, the polar opposite of my world.  Crazy that two sisters that are best friends could live completely different lives… LOVE IT!!) and a chance to go back to my roots.

The weekend that I was home to Montana just happened to be the weekend that the American Legion was holding an event to raise money for the fair grounds. Funny that until now I hadn’t realized who was responsible for the fairgrounds there.  Where is the fair board, you ask?  There isn’t one.  Our county doesn’t actually hold a county fair.  Instead they team up with a couple neighboring counties to put on a Tri-County fair in Deer Lodge.  Looky there… Learned something new, didn’t ya!

So no fair board, no money from the county, and therefore in need of some creative fundraising.

The highlight of the day was a rough stock buck-out featuring the bulls of a local rough stock contractors, Rod and Bonnie Conat and Steven Graveley.  They may not be PBR material just yet but that very well may be where they are heading.  Some of these bulls were young and inexperienced, but they certainly have potential.  But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any old seasoned bulls that knew how to put on a show.  I was thoroughly entertained!

I did have one small complaint, and you will see it here in a minute.  They had hauled in a bunch of panels to make a much smaller ring to buck in.  Smart, right?  They won’t have to chase bulls all day to move on to the next one.  But they forgot to think of the lady sitting in the stands with two tired kids crawling on her lap while she tried to take pictures.  So that means that in between you and the action will be some panels and what not.  Just pretend its not there…

Regardless of how the panels may or may not have ruined the ambiance of the pictures, it was still a fun day for a rodeo!   

How to Fertility and Disease Test Bulls

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We got to use our new silencer chute (hooray for a new chute!) for the first time last week.  We had 20 bulls to test and we did it in almost half the time that it took when we used the old one (I think The Rancher will keep it…).  It made testing bulls so much more exciting!  As if testing for STDs and fertility isn’t exciting enough!
 
There are regulations that cattle ranchers have to run by, mostly to prevent the spread of diseases through the herd and neighboring cows.  Before we can turn our herd bulls out with the cows, we have to test for trichomoniasis (trich)- a disease that will pass between cows and bulls as they breed.  This test is state regulated and has to be done by a vet.      
 
I feel bad for the bulls (just a little) because the test requires a few penile cells.  To get them they insert a small tube in the folds of the penis and wiggle it around to scrape off a few cells.  They are put into a solution to be sent off to be tested.  Each year we put tags in to show that the bulls have been trich tested and are good to go. 
 
These days, it is more of a precaution than an actual defense against the spread of trich. The vet was telling us that their clinic went out and tested 35,000 bulls and not one of them tested positive for trich.  We like to hear that!
 
Even if we didn’t test for trich, we would still bring the bulls in to test for fertility.  No one makes us do it, but we choose to test as part of our herd management.  When we know that there is a bull shooting blanks, we will pull him.  If he can’t perform he is costing us, mostly for the cows that don’t get bred (which won’t have a calf to sell). 
 
The vet starts with quick scrotal circumference measurement.  It also gives the vet a chance to palpate, or feel, for any deformities or hernias.  We’ve got to make sure that the family jewels are in good condition!
 
That’s the easy part…

In order to test fertility, we need a sperm count.  To get a sperm count, we need the bull’s semen.  To get the semen, we need the bull to ejaculate.  There’s two ways to go about it.  You can manually stimulate the bull by going inside the rectum and rubbing.  Or you can use an electrical pulsator in the rectum. 

We use the puslator, which by has been most commonly called the “Torpedo.”  Or The Rancher’s Sidekick called it a rocket (“Mom, what’s grandpa doing with that rocket?”).  You call it what you want…

Once the bull begins to ejaculate, the vet will catch about a tablespoon of semen.  He takes a few drops of the collected semen to put on a slide to be looked at under his microscope.  He can count the number of sperm and tell if there is enough to consider the bull to be fertile.  He can also see if there are any damaged or dysfunctional sperm.  Even if the pull is making sperm, damaged sperm still won’t do the job.  Once we get the all clear we send the bull on his way and start again with the next.

Not everyone will do fertility testing, just assuming that the young bulls are fertile and will pull them as they get older.  We’re mighty glad we don’t cull bulls that way… We found a three year old bull that didn’t pass his fertility test.  When this happens, we will generally do a second test a few weeks later.  The first test could have just been a rusty load or he really could be infertile.

Thanks to the Bear River Animal hospital for coming out and giving us another exciting lesson on the bull end of cattle reproduction!
 

 

 
 

To the Leadore Angus Ranch Bull Sale

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At this time of year, the ranchers around here have bulls on the brain.  There is a lot of prep work to be done before we turn the bulls out for another summer. 
I have to throw this out there that I am so glad I’m not a cow (for a lot of reasons) because if someone was planning my next pregnancy this close to having my last baby (or if I was about to have a baby) I think I would give them a zap with the hot shot.
Good thing the cows don’t feel this way, because we are getting things geared up out here.  One bull will cover (breed) about 25 cows, which means we need about 35 bulls.  Choosing and buying new bulls can be pretty intense.  The bulls we choose will factor in the end product we have- a good finished steer or a good replacement heifer.
The Rancher, the kids and I loaded up in the truck the other day and headed out to Leadore, Idaho (which happens to be where we met, fell in love, and lived when we were first married!) to find a bull at the Leadore Angus Ranch bull sale.
Before the auction ever starts they give the ranchers time to really look through the bulls.  They give out as much information on the bull as possible to help buyers find what they want.  In their sale magazine they have the parents of each bull, the bull’s individual performance (which is his birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight, ect.) and then a list of the expected progeny difference (how they think the calves from this bull will perform).
It’s a lot to take in.  In fact, I don’t even know what it all means!  I guess that’s why I brought The Rancher…  He was looking for a good bull for first time heifers.  What he looks for in that jumble of numbers is a bull that will have a low birth weight (it makes calving easier for first time heifers), a high weaning weight (it means they gain weight well), and high milk production (for the heifers we will keep to be mommas later on).   PS, did you know that milking traits are paternal, not maternal? Another important bit of info to look at was the CED, calving ease direct.  It directly identifies which bulls will lead to easier calving. 
Picking out a bull by the numbers is just the first part.  Since we are looking to market our calves for meat, we want to produce cuts that have high marbling and a large rib eye (the spot where all of your steaks come out of) surface area.  So the next page of numbers we looked at was the results from an ultrasound which gave the bull’s muscle and fat measurements.
After narrowing down the bulls we liked based on the progeny potential and the meat quality potential, it was time to actually go see the bulls.  We look for a really fleshy bull, something with a wide backside and a long, deep body.  Something that would grow a lot of good meat!  We also check out their condition and how well they will make it out on the range.  Some of the areas our cattle will go can be pretty intense, so we need a bull that will keep up and get the job done.
The real fun is when the auction gets started.  There is all of the bustle of the people, the constant rambling of the auctioneer (I know its not rambling, that’s what it sounds like), the cattle moving in and out, and the ring man taking bids.  There is a sort of tension in the air from the buyers trying to bid at just the right time against their competition, the men working the sale trying to get it just right, and the owners trying to have everything just right for a good sale day.  I really meant it when I say the auction is the fun part!  I love it all!
It was a little more stressful for The Rancher because he was busy trying to get in on those few bulls he really liked without paying a fortune!  His patience won out and got him a really nice heifer bull at a good price.  All in all, it was another good day for The Rancher and posse!
 
 
 

About Me

Hello! I'm Allison, The Rancher's Wife! There's nothing I love more than being out on the ranch with my husband and kids. Join me for a look at what goes on here at the ranch and the life being a rancher's wife!

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