the pastoral muse: A Weaning Trial

The sun is out today and filtering through the golden quakie out my office window. We have a week of sunny weather in the forecast. It’s now or never for those last minute autumn chores.

We had a hard frost a couple of days ago. I gathered the last of the garden produce just in time. I was sad to find green spots on my potatoes. My fault for not getting the young plants hilled up or covered thoroughly with mulch. I brought in the last of the tomatoes to ripen indoors and gathered the few remaining cabbages, beets and onions.

We’re trying a new weaning method this fall. We set up a portable corral and chute on the range and put nose flaps in the calves to prevent them from sucking. They hang out with Mom but can’t suck so the weaning process is gradual. We’ll truck the calves home after 4 days and leave the cows in the high country. The calves will go right out on stockpiled feed in the green pastures here at home and not miss Mom so much. At least that’s the plan.

We had a big crew to gather the herd, sort the calves off, weigh each one and install the flaps. Every single person had a job. Seth and Alan worked the chute. Leah and Jessica worked the alley. Amy ran the gate to the scales. Mark, Jesse and I kept them coming from the back end. Dave, Gary and Gus gathered and sorted. Danielle recorded the weight of each calf, perching an umbrella over her paperwork during the snow storm.

We took turns eating sandwiches so we could keep the flow going and finished with the calves about 4:30 pm. From there we took the corral apart, loading the 16’ panels one by one in the stock trailer, folding up the portable system and hauling the chute down to where we set the whole thing up again to load out in a few days. By the time we were done it was dark, 8:00 pm, very cold and very windy. I think we froze some of our help. None of us were ready for that.

I like to get a photo at the end of a day of working cattle. Our morale was pretty low at one point when we thought the snow storm might last all day. But when the clouds broke and we got a couple hours of sun we all felt better. And of course when the job is done everyone can relax and smile for the camera.

Mark has been back to the range every day since. The herd got a gate down one day and had to be put back. The water we were depending on is scant. Strays are coming in on us. I saw one calf who had figured out how to nurse around the nose apparatus. We’ll know in a couple of weeks whether we got them weaned without any sickness.

Mark and I talk about this a lot. One just has to accept that things are seldom ideal. It’s hard for things to go smoothly. It happens once in a while but usually we have a hiccup, or more commonly a stumble, along the way. We need to remember that it's a good ranch and we do our best for our cows.

Seth texted me a link to an article from Harvard University. A professor of psychology, Daniel Gilbert, has been researching our changing perception of problems. He says, “when problems become rare, we count more things as problems . . . when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it.” Oh, how true this is.

It’s like the advice a rancher in our marketing cooperative gave the other day. He was talking about cowboys who dreaded going to the city to hand out beef samples to our customers. “Lower your expectations,” he said. Good advice for all kinds of ranching endeavors.