The Power of a Good Design

We made it all the way to 78 degrees last week, and today a soft rain is falling. The green and the beauty in our world has exploded. Mount Putnam in the distance never looks more beautiful than this time of year when it's still white, but framed in the foreground with the greens of spring.    

The quakie leaves out our office window are the size of a dime, which is significant only because Grandpa Eldro used to say that when the quakies in the mountains had dime-sized leaves, it was time to turn out the cows. My biologist friends would call it phenology, nature's calendar, in rancher-speak.

The barn is empty at the moment. I was thinking about my last two blogs and how readers might assume we have lots of calving trouble. Not so. What I don’t write about are the “invisible” cows - all those hundreds that calve on their own unassisted. They’re our favorite cows and the ones that make our business sustainable. 

We shipped yearlings out of the new loading facility. Our new “Bud Box,” named for Bud Williams, the now deceased guru of animal handling from Bowie, Texas, worked like a charm. It’s designed in a square with the exit to the chute at a right angle to where the cattle enter. This funnels cattle back to where they came from, so that in their natural inclination to return to familiar surroundings, they load into the stock trailer with little pressure. Our old chute is like most traditional facilities in that cattle go straight into a smaller loading alley and into the truck, with the handler having to get right behind them in their blind spot, which cattle don’t like. In the new scenario, we work them from their side where they can see us and remain calm.

And the new chute is safe - for livestock and their human handlers. I’m forever campaigning (not complaining, campaigning) for our equipment and cattle handling facilities to be safe enough for anyone to use - young and old, male and female, experienced or not.

I have always believed in and appreciated the power of a good design. The Bud Box is one example; it lubricates, simplifies, even beautifies the art of cattle handling. 

thanks Bud

coming off the scales, Gary and Seth

what remains of the old chute to the left . . . and the new