Blog - The Idaho Rancher's Wife

So Many Calves, So Many Tags

March 20, 2015 by Allison

Having tripled the number of cows that are calving on the ranch that means we get to spend a significant more time tagging. And if we don’t spend a good chunk of tagging every day the number of calves needing tagging really piles up. In fact, we did have a few days pass by where we didn’t get to the tagging, which meant The Rancher and Rancher Sr. spent nearly the entire morning getting caught up.

The hard part isn’t necessarily that there are so many to do. Yes, it takes more time from their day, but they just expect that in the midst of calving and tagging season. What really stinks about missing days of tagging is that the calves get bigger and faster in such a short time. If we get to them within the first day of being born, they don’t really take off or aren’t too fast on those new legs. But give them a few days and they get a little stronger and a little wiser and take you for a chase! I tease The Rancher that its the best way he gets his running in. If he really wanted to go running so bad, he could just come in the mornings with me rather than letting the calves get too old. As you can imagine, he just rolls his eyes at me…

Tagging for us is pretty simple. With the heifer calves, we match the momma’s number to the calves. That’s mostly because they tend to forget which calf is there and need a little help (I’m so funny…). But its helps us to make sure everything is pairing up ok. With the older cows we are tagging the pure bred calves with an orange tag vs the sem-angus cross calves with a black tag. We differentiate which ear heifers and steers get tagged. Just a few things for us to see about the calf when we look at it. They all get their first round of shots and then the boys get castrated with a rubber cheerio.

When I write it all out like that, it seems like a lot more than what we do in reality. It only takes just a minute. And that sure is a good thing with so many babies and so many tags!

Late Night Babies

March 16, 2015 by Allison

Life would have it that whatever crazy that could happen, will happen at just the wrong time. I mean, we all live a life with Murphy stopping in for a visit. Some even have a spare room for Murphy… Calving always brings good ol’ Murphy along for a stop in, but fortunately for us it hasn’t been too frequent!

Really our calving is going great! (but now that I have spoken it out to to the blog world we are doomed, I’m so sure…) These first time mammas are doing terrific. There is always an occasional issue of one heifer trying to claim another but that’s easy enough to handle. And not too many have needed help birthing. Only a handful have had calves big enough that the cowboys have stepped in to pull it. And then all of the babies are doing well to jump up just as soon as they splat on the ground. We really can’t complain.

But there are those couple of times of craziness that keep us from letting our guard down. There was a freezing, moonlit night that particuarily comes to mind. It was a cold night, but I’m sure that it seemed so much colder because as late as it was, I was all so cozy and ready for bed. But every calving season we need one bed time calf pull.

The Rancher had gone out for a meeting just as dinner was ending, promising it would be quick- only like a half hour or hour at the most. I knew better but it wasn’t a big deal because I would just put the babies to bed and have some time to myself. The kids bathed, we cleaned up toys and settled in the chair for some stories before bed time. It didn’t take long for sister to fall asleep and I was left to snuggle with The Rancher’s Sidekick. We had just finished Curious George when The Rancher came home, two hours later! He said a quick hello, grabbed his flash light and headed out again, this time on the 4wheeler. It was his week for the late check, so it wasn’t a big deal. It turned out to be a big deal when he came right back home. A check that quick means something is up and required icky clothes.

My suspicions were confirmed when I heard him on the phone calling Rancher Sr. asking for help to pull a calf. The heifer had started before he had left and it had been long enough that it was time to get the calf out. Of course she would need to be pulled just after I had pulled on my pjs and was minutes from getting The Rancher’s Sidekick to bed. But the ranch girl in me wouldn’t miss a chance to help. So we bundled up, pjs and all, to help dad pull the calf.

Getting the heifer in the maternity pen proved to be an issue of itself. They generally go in pretty well when they can see where they are heading, but getting them in during the night has its own issues to be dealt with. Just imagine a cow in labor running while you chase her having only a spotlight to help you see all while still trying to drive the 4wheeler… fast… When the chase gets that intense, I opt to sit out because experience has told me that The Rancher can get a little crazy. I choose life, thanks… I think that they traipsed across the heifer hill so many times that they hit all for corners, nearly went out the gate, and then finally made it in.

Looking at the heifer we were pretty worried because things did not look normal. There wasn’t a bubble showing or feet poking out. It just looked weird. Lucky for us, everything was going fine but it was just a huge calf. A LUNKER of a calf. After some intense pulling and pushing and groaning (from the cow, not just me) we had a baby. Having babies of my own has made me quite sympathetic and I think that every time I watch those heifers calve I push right along with them. Its tough work!

The happy arrival of this baby heifer wasn’t the end of the night. Yes this story had a happy ending, the momma licking the baby and baby struggling up. But while The Rancher and Rancher Sr. were getting this momma in, they noticed another calf. A hardly licked off teensy baby without a momma. Abandonment is not really conducive to survival. Kinda common sense, but not all heifers have it. We buzzed around what seemed like forever until we found who we figured was the mom. We tried chasing her over to the baby. We trying just letting her go over to it herself. We tried getting her into the maternity pens. And all she would do was run. If it were me, I’m pretty sure I would park myself and not move- going for a run after birth doesn’t sound good to me! But this cow had something else on her mind and just did not want to take care of her calf.

At that point there wasn’t a lot we could do but wait and see. The calf was in a good place for the night so we opted to let them play things out and we would just keep checking in on them. We headed into the house to thaw our frozen cheeks. Come morning the darn cow STILL hadn’t claimed her calf. And with the morning came more attempts to get her in and get the calf on her. At that point we opted to just take the calf and put her on the milk cow.

Now why couldn’t all of this craziness have happened in the sunshiny day rather than the freezing night? I dunno… There must be some sort of quota those cows have to fill of keeping us up in the night. On the plus side, at least we only had to go out once. And we got to finish Curious Gorge before our wild night began!

Bringing in the Babies- The First Look of the 2015 Calf Crop

March 11, 2015 by Allison

There are so many babies at our house! I love it! In fact, I almost don’t know what to do with myself… Actually… sadly, I haven’t run out to frolic with the new babies as much as I would like. But I still get to drive by them every day and see them enjoying the hot sun. Occasionally I’ll get the privilege to run through the cows to check for any newbie (that really means that everyone else is gone and I’m the all they got to keep an eye on things.. HA!).

And when I do go out I grab the kids and the camera and we enjoy a few minutes in the nursery. There are a few fresh babies we have found, some very protective mommas that we have kept our distance and lots of cute squeals from my babies about the new cuties!

Loving the Open Range

February 27, 2015 by Allison

I’m a Montana girl. The small ranching town I grew up in was just a little valley, cross crossed with streams and rivers. Something very VERY different from where we are ranching now. Everything was green. All the time. That may be exaggeration, but really I remember that there was so much green-ness. So many meadows, so many hay fields. There were little groves of trees everywhere. Really so much green! And then there were the skies. I love the fresh and blue open skies. The clear mornings that renew each morning with a new sunrise. The sunsets were made with cord that illustrated that God truly is an artist. And the clarity of the nighttime sky allowed you to see even the most distant stars. Whenever I go home I just drink it all in.

Here we have a few trees. Unless you count the sage brush, which some if them are big enough you could consider them to be trees. Actually, I love the safe brush. The smells that come from when you move cows through them or when it’s raining.

It’s this lifestyle that let’s me have those open skies, the green-ness, and the fresh air.

It’s amazing to me how we can be all a part of the same industry but do it so differently. We can raise cattle in this errid, dry dessert just as well as my family did in the fertile river plains. Just very differently. Very differently.

Sometimes the differences get me a little homesick for the way we did things. You may take the girl out of Montana, but you can never take Montana out of the girl. So the days when we go out on the wide open range it satisfies the little Montana girl inside of me. Like last week when we dropped the cows off to Locomotive. It was that time of year to haul the cows down south. The kids and I hopped on the semi with The Rancher for a day out. We were only there for the few minutes to unload but they were wonderful moments.

Although some of the open range is a little bland, the skies can be amazing. You can see for miles with the beautiful blue mountains in the back grounds and the dazzling blue colors. The open skies and fresh air take me back to my big sky country. I guess where ever you are, you find little bits of home.

Mother Nature’s Desert Treasures

February 24, 2015 by Allison

The desert of Locomotive is a place of itself. It doesn’t seem to follow any of Mother Nature’s rules. It has it’s own freak storms, crazy winds and weird weather.

Today is the day we get to haul some of the cows to Locomotive to spend the next few month and I’m reminded again of some of the strange and cool things Mother Nature has put out there

Like some of the intense rock work out there. There are places where the wind gets whipping so hard it has carved around and through the rocks. Of courses that been over hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of years. There’s a small cliff (it can hardly be called a cliff… But for lack of abetter term… Meh…) that has a sorts if Who-Ville look to it. It has silly windows and what could look like odd doors. Splash a little paint on it and you would have jumped into Sr. Seuss’ world!

This year we have had an incredible amount of juniper berries. Like loads and buckets and smatterings of berries. Why? The old timers were telling us that it meant we would have a record snowfall and the trees were preparing for it. I don’t know if that was right, since we have had like no snow, but maybe it was all the moisture last fall. Either way it’s cool to see so many berries.

One of my favorite oddities to check our is the wildfire aftermath. 50 Years ago (I’m totally guessing here) there were some crazy fires burning through these ceder hills. The fire must have burned hot and fast because it looks like they started up on fire , burned out and just fell apart. I love the natural, abstract art Mother Nature made from it.

We may be running on the desert- the dry barren desert. But every once in a while we find our own little treasures, provided by Mother Nature herself. It’s the desert’s own kind of unique beauty.

Feeding as a Family

February 18, 2015 by Allison

Feeding- the pass time of winter. If there is one thing you can guarantee we will be doing this time of year it is putting the hay out. The tedious redundancy gets to The Rancher. He just feels like it eats up his time, doing the same thing over and over. Hmmm… He wouldn’t make a good house wife (I’m pretty sure I have said that one before). Having to cook and clean up after people over and over… I’d love it if feeding only took two hours of my whole day.

Despite the fact that feed isn’t The Rancher’s favorite ranch chore, it may be one of mine. Lately Rancher Sr. has been gone on the weekends quite a bit while he supports Cowboy E in his last season of wrestling. That means that The Rancher either gets to feed on his own or I jump into help. I LOVE any opportunity to prove to my cowboy that he needs me, so of course I head out to help him. Really its more than that- I love to get out on the ranch, love to drive through the cows to see how they are doing, and I love the photography moments I get. But more than that I love being able to take the kids out with us and work together as a family.

Living and working on the ranch is so much more than a job to us. There is no separation between home life and work. Sometimes that has its problems, but there are way more blessings that come that makes it worth it. The best take home of all this for this ranch momma is the memories we are making every day. I love looking into the tractor seeing The Ranch Princess jabbering to her daddy. I see her getting excited at the cows, the horses, and the few baby calves. I can just hear her saying, at the top of her lungs, “Look daddy! COWS!!” (actually its more like wook daddy, tows… so cute!) While we drive between fields The Rancher’s Sidekick has picked up battling thumbs in an intense game of thumb war. I’m pretty sure that he is cheating more and more each time, so maybe we should stop with that one… He pals around with me on the 4 wheeler as we cut bale strings, begging to drive. Even stomping the mice as they come out of the bales has become a fun memory!

Sure life on the ranch can be redudant. Every year has the same seasons of calves, seasons of changing sprinklers, seasons of moving cows and seasons of working cows. But the best part about life on the ranch is that we get to do it as a family and spice up the redudant moments by making memories. We feed cows and enrich our souls. That’s what we did today!

A Muddy Morning on the Ranch

February 12, 2015 by Allison

Are you tired of hearing about the weather? Everything we do goes back to the weather. Too hot, too cold, too windy … Always something. Not that I’m complaining, it’s just interesting what Mother Nature throws out there for us.

What’s our current weather issue? If you can believe it, it’s the mud. We are having splendidly warm temperatures and beautiful blue skies. It’s so warm the ground isn’t really freezing. Good or bad? I dunno it just means that we sink down, down, down… Deep down. The warm weather in iteself isn’t too bad. But the warm temps means that instead of getting snow we get rain. Its been fabulous to have the rain. We have loved the moisture… it’s the after math of the wonderful rain that is causing the problems. The ground has become so saturated (awesome!) that the rain doesn’t soak right in. The puddles are lasting longer, the mud is soupier, and its actually running down the sides of the road.

Because I am the awesome wife that I am, I help feed cows whenever Rancher Sr. is gone (which has been more lately with Cowboy E’s crazy wrestling schedule). With what has become the typical division of labor, I’m the one that gets to be out in the mud. I open the gates, I cut the strings, I get to hang off the tractor and flipped in the mud. Needless to say, I’m the one that goes home a complete mess. What I do because I rock (just kidding)…

But really its ok, I’m over it. We can handle the mud, the heaping stinking piles of poopy mud and the endless supply of mud following us where ever we go. We can handle it because having the mud means that we do have rain and we do have warm weather. Although its tough to deal with nows, we feel so blessed and watched over. The rain is what we have been praying for for so long and its inspiring to see it finally come. What better way to start the new year than to be in a muddy mess, blessed with rain?!

Counting Our Blessings, One Fat Cow at a Time

February 5, 2015 by Allison

Our Monday morning drive to check water- oh how I love it. When else do I get to sit and ride with kids constrained (I mean buckled, of course) and just take pictures. I hate those days when something comes up and we don’t get to go. Like all January…

Finally I got my turn to trip around Locomotive with my main man and small peeps. I came to a few conclusions- Locomotive is prettier with snow, we don’t have a lot of feed, and our cows are fat. Somehow the last two parts of that don’t seem to go together but it’s what’s happening down south. The few, but saving fall rains have done the good we needed to give our cows the nourishment for the winter. It may be dry and we still need rain, lots of rain, but we are counting our blessings. We have fat, healthy, pregnant cows- a wonderful beginning to our new year!

Not Letting the Drought Win

February 5, 2015 by Allison

There are few things ranchers depend on for their industry- cows/calves to sell, buyers to buy, and feed to fatten them up. The first two are in pretty constant supply, feed on the other hand… Well that’s a little subjective…

There is always feed out there, but good quality feed at a good price can be hard to come by. Why? One word… DROUGHT.

The last few years we (and by “we” I collectively mean all or most ranchers) have been needing rain in a bad way. Without rain grass, grain, alfalfa, hay, whatever won’t grow. Pretty cut and dry (hehe, dry… that’s what we are right now!).

The other day we had our turn to check water in Locomotive on our BLM association ground and we took a turn through our private ground to check the feed. Our private land in Locomotive is where we take our cows to calve out every winter, the turnout day coming up in just a few weeks. But the sad truth is that its going to be a very different year for Locomotive.

Throughout the summer and fall we have been keeping an eye on our feed down south, hoping and praying the rain and sun to get to work to make grass that we need to winter the cows. As the time has gotten closer and closer to moving cows out there we have realized we don’t have NEAR enough feed to winter all the cows there and keep the ground healthy.

Last year it was rough. With years of drought, we finally grazed it down to its limit. And we hate getting to that point. We consider ourselves stewards of the land. We care for it, trying to keep it flourishing in something more than tumble weed. But without the rains and the tough soil we have struggled the last few years. You can see in the pictures that the normal greenish brown is yellowish brown or even more greyish brown.

So what’s a ranching family to do in a situation like this? We could just take the cows down and not care. But we care. We want this land to sustain itself and our cows. We need this land to sustain itself and our cows. So we are keeping most of the cows home this winter. We will take down the number of cows we think will make it on the range and keep the rest here. That means The (poor) Rancher will have LOTS of cows to feed at home… bummer. And we might have some tougher weather for our cows to calve in… And we might have a little more sickness go through the calves since they won’t be spread out across the range. But we are hoping that we can help the land to renew itself and be fruitful in the coming years. This year will mean we get to put in a little more work, but protecting our land, something we CAN’T do without, is worth any effort.

So with a little less cows, a little more rain, maybe a few grass seeds, and a lot of faith we are trying to care for the land and not let this drought win.

A Midnight Bust

January 30, 2015 by Allison

I was looking back over the posts from last year. Sort of reminiscing about what was happening this time last year and then just kept scrolling. As I was going through, I realized that there are some stories that I never shared. These are the stories that are worth telling. You know that because they are the stories that I can still remember after so much time having past…

I live by the theory of better late than never (you know that already for all of the times I’ve taken you back!). Looking back this was a crazy, comical night but at the time it was frustrating, nerve racking and … I guess any issue that begins after dark at the end of a long day is doomed to be a hair puller

We had just gotten out of the shower (I say we because we everyone had to go through my shower that night… Why do we have 2 bathroom when we only use mom’s?) when I heard the 4 wheeler buzzing around. People usually don’t go for a moonlight ride so I knew something was up. The Rancher slipped into something more fitting for the ranch then his jammies while I put the babies to bed. Finally when I made it out to see what was happening (because The Rancher had been gone long enough for me to know that it was bad news- whatever it was) I learned that the most recent batch of weaned calves had escaped the corral and were heading in all sorts of directions. They went up the highway, down the highway, to the shop, to the haystack and to the alfalfa… awesome…

The Rancher and Rancher Sr. were buzzing around bringing in what calves they could find. You see, finding black calves in the dark of a moonless night is tough to do. You hear them before you ever see them and unless you have GREAT hearing you just might think you are getting around them but really you are heading straight out them. When I first showed up I just waited for orders from the cowboys. It was a long wait… So long I gave up waiting for their instruction and took it upon myself to guard the gate. It didn’t take long for me to see that as many calves got brought in would wander out. Not very productive…

So I guarded the gate. And it seemed to work. The boys would whoop and holler and bring the calves and I would keep them from escaping. Every so often there would be a handful that made their way to the gate and I was able to get them in (so proud of myself! Earning so many rancher’s wife stripes!). But the handfuls started getting bigger and more frequent and I began to realize that the blasted calves were hopping the fence and walking back to the gate. I had been putting the same calves in over and over! GREAT… Rancher Sr. came in and as soon as I could I explained that we weren’t keeping them in… Making no progress. So we got what calves we had and pushed them in the corral. Finally safe. Locked in. j

We did this dance of getting the calves in the back pen, running to open the small man gate to the corral, pushing the calves to the gate avoiding the holes in the fence, and trying not to pee my pants every time they scare me as they come around the hay stack.

Eventually the calves stopped coming and we figured we could call it a night. All was left to do was lock the gates up good and PRAY that nothing spent the night in the alfalfa to bloat or on the road to get hit. Come morning we found we were blessed to keep the calves in for the remainder of the night and the couple of strays that spent the night roaming didn’t die.

Looking back on this Thursday night I remember what an exciting eventful fall night we shared when the calves had their midnight jail break. You could almost say we had a romantic night with the only lights of the starry sky (and the few flashlights and 4 wheeler headlights) but I’m sure that’s not how The Rancher looks back on it. A little anxiety and a lot of relief. Maybe he won’t want to relive this Throwback Thursday memory!