a christmas story

We got the cows home. It feels good to have them on good feed and water after their long walk down from the range. And even though they’re working on pastures and heading towards the haystack, it’s nice to have them close by again. I put the lunch cooler, the walkie-talkies and the travel thermos away for the winter. After traveling up and down on washboardy roads all summer, we’re happy to stay put for a few months.

We had beautiful weather in the mountains, sunny and cold, no wind. I had the pleasure of a long leisurely walk behind the herd with my dog keeping the stragglers caught up. Not so leisurely, however, when we got near home and the cattle spread out on fall grain. There was much running, hollering and dogging before we got them lined out again.

When we got to the valley we put the herd in "Lorin's corral," a sturdy set of pipe corrals built by a good cowboy and neighbor who's been trailing cattle in Heaven for some years now. He lives on in perpetuity for all the ranching outfits that use his facility when heading to and from the range. We put them through the pens, sorting off the young cows expecting their first or second calf and anybody that wasn’t bred or that needed attention. The older cows went to one pasture, the younger cows to another. 

Mark is amazing. He knows these mothers so well. Better than he knows his own wife. They’re so much easier to read and understand! Each one has a unique ear tag so we can all identify them, but Mark's presence means something more, much more, as each one gets the attention they need. That will be Mark’s legacy, a set of cows that got the best of care.

The kids came home to get Christmas junipers last weekend. Leah, who as a kid enjoyed fresh popcorn and hot cider at the local tree lot, brought these two treats along for us all. How fun is that? She's in for it, though, because now it's a tradition. Callie stuffed two trees in her PT Cruiser to take back to Boise, Cole and Anna got two as well, one for Cole's Mom, and Seth and Leah chose a small one for their cozy home. Mark and I always get a big tree over my objections - too tall to decorate. And here it stands, waiting for him to lug in a ladder to get the lights on. He's in charge of watering it, by the gallons, he says. 

Our tree feels and smells so familiar. My folks always had a juniper at Christmas time. The trees were free for the cutting and beyond plentiful in the mountains, even seen as invasive now. Mom had blue lights with star-shaped reflectors surrounding each bulb. And those little carousels hung nearby that twirled from the heat. Remember them? And real-life socks hung on a real-life fireplace. Oh, but the magic of it all. 

But here's the deal, wasn’t it just Christmas a few weeks ago?

      

three years makes a tradition

 

winter quarters during the homesteading era

off the bluff while getting trees

on top of my world, no cows up this high

starting towards home

It Could Happen!

I had a blog all started about the mild November we were having in the mountains. How I had walked a tributary of Meadow Creek looking for brook trout spawners and, not finding any, had decided it had been too warm and sunny yet. And how, at the spring, the water bubbled up sending concentric circles out in a delicately repeated pattern. Then it all ended abruptly with snow and high winds. We've been in the hills every day since, gathering stragglers, breaking water, convincing cattle that there was indeed grass under the snow and to go eat it already!

Yesterday we trailed the herd to a lower pasture and will get another couple of weeks before walking them down to the home ranch. I checked the cabin before we left and discovered someone had broken a window out and put a big hole in the card table. Luckily the window was a slider so I brought it home to get fixed. It takes two weeks to get a replacement and I doubt if the roads will be passable by then. I hate to think of the window being out all winter. We have a saying for this kind of disappointment in our fellow humans: “people are the worst.”

I’m loving it at home as the days get shorter. This time of year a homemaker’s thoughts turn to tending the wood stove, comfort cooking, and wading through all the domestic jobs we neglected while the weather took us outdoors. But the outdoors still beckon. I took the dogs for a walk tonight and smelled the sweet fragrance of damp cottonwood leaves and tromped through lots of sumptuous stockpiled grass. The buckskin and browns of the horses mirror the now muted colors perfectly.  

I keep thinking about a CD that Mark and I listened to as we traveled back and forth to the mountains. It’s a book called Outwitting the Devil by Napolean Hill, which was written in 1938, post WWI and in the midst of the Great Depression, and while Hitler was gathering power in Germany. The author is interviewing the Devil. It was chilling to listen to the Devil explain that the ability to think for ourselves is his greatest enemy and how through propaganda the public is manipulated thereby creating a perfect void for his influence.

As a counterweight, I just finished the book, From What Is to What If, by Rob Hopkins. It’s a hopeful book, so fitting for today with a pandemic upon us and an election under threat. The author admonishes us to cultivate our sense of imagination, and that it is, in fact, the only way to find solutions to complex, nagging, seemingly insurmountable problems.

It applies to our world, our local communities, and right here at home on the ranch. How does it look and feel if, as Hopkins describes, “it all turns out OK?” Well, for the ranch it looks like a great quality of life for us and our kids AND the work getting done. For our community it looks like neighbors protecting neighbors by using Covid spread prevention practices without a fuss. For our world it plays out with a united front against climate change which reduces fossil fuel use AND leads to better land management that cycles carbon in healthy ways.  

I wrote a quote from the book that encapsulates this crazy notion that what we can imagine, we can create. I wrote it on our whiteboard in the kitchen, “I bet it can be done, though.” 

November colors

good grazing on fresh feed

This grass fills me up

2020 Friends

Yes, I feel apprehension before the election. And I’m concerned and feel compassion for those who will be affected by the outcome more than me. But meanwhile the sun is pouring in our south-facing windows, I just dug some gorgeous carrots out of the garden, and the calves are home on green grass and staying healthy. Today I'm content. 

We weaned the calves in a two-stage process. Mark set up corrals and a chute in the mountains and put a crew together for Sunday. First we separated the calves from the cows, then one-by-one worked the calves through the chute to give them a vaccination and a multi-vitamin shot, and put a plastic flap in their nose to keep them from sucking. We let them back out with their Moms to stay together but get weaned off milk for four days. Then we went back and hauled the calves home in time to get the flaps taken out by dusk. They were put straight out on pastures with abundant drinking water nearby. 

Using nose flaps is rare in our area. It’s our third year of trying it. Most ranchers wean cold turkey like we did for many years. It's really dependent on each ranch's set up and what works for them. Remaining curious and willing to learn new things is always a good idea and we like the results so far.

We couldn't have done it without an army of friends, our faithful employees, and lots of family. The kids came home to help and Anita prepared beef soup for lunch. I heated the soup in a cabin nearby so we could get out of the wind to eat. And wind there was. At the end of the day we looked horrible. Our eyes were gummy and part of the crew still had a long drive ahead of them before starting their work week on Monday. I made a note to round up some goggles for next time.    

We say thank you to our helpers, but it always seems so inadequate. Our friends give up their free time to essentially do slave labor for fun. Good grief.  

I had "none jobs" (a kid saying) after lunch, so I cleaned the cabin with a squirt bottle of cleaner someone had left behind and a couple of random paper towels. Lots of sweeping of flies from the carpet. I could watch the crew working cattle, but be inside where it was quiet and warmed by the wood stove. 

I usually worry a lot before big cattle days like this, but managed to stop myself this time. I just put my trust in my husband and went with the flow. After nigh on 30 years of marriage and working together on the ranch, I’m sure Mark just shakes his head. What he doesn’t know is how many crises I've averted by worrying ahead of time!

Trust, faith, calm - such good attributes to keep in mind as we enter a winter with a pandemic raging, civil unrest simmering, and an election where 70% of people think that if their guy loses doomsday will ensue. If you’re worried, my best idea is to do something that fills you up today. Contribute to your community. Get outdoors and revel in autumn. Think hard about your principles, write that letter to the editor, attend your next zoom call with a smile, and get on with it.   

our dream team

a dirty windy day

Walking through History

The wind is blowing again, three days in a row. It always does this just when you want the colorful leaves of autumn to stay suspended in the trees - but no - they fall to the ground one after another. 

It’s a lovely time of year on the ranch for lots of reasons. One the beauty . . . and the silence. Another is that it’s transition time. The work flow has a gap in it so that we can do something special – something that isn’t routine maintenance of a cow herd. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s still about cows! It’s always about cows. 

Mark and Jesse hauled several loads of gravel for odds and ends work in the mountains. Fall is the only time you can drive through the seeps without getting stuck. They shored up some creek crossings to funnel the cattle to an easy crossing which helps protect the stream banks. 

Mark and I had a couple of “date night” pasture walks. I campaign for these times because for the rest of the year we go to the fields to work – to feed cows in the winter, to irrigate or hunt weeds in the summer - anything but walk and talk and listen and learn. Mark needs a nudge to go because I don’t think he likes the probing questions I ask. I get it. Questions with answers that look like work aren’t helpful. But I still think we can make progress without causing more work if we think big enough. It could happen! 

I tell Mark that finding the right questions to ponder is my forte. I’m not going to rebuild the irrigation dykes or reconfigure a headgate by myself. I’ll help him repair fence, but won’t build one on my own. The role of a ranch wife is her own creation. Some women do build that fence - and others are so removed they couldn’t even show you where the fence is. 

We spent a day in the hills loosening fences for winter and I took photos of how the creeks and pastures look before winter. We discussed the existence of old roads, barely visible, that seem to lead to nowhere, and were surely put there by sheepherders pulling their camps and tending thousands of sheep in the early days of white settlement, long before fences divided the land by ownership. The ruts are grassed in; a rusted tin can lies in the grass, left to tell the story. 

We often look at a piece of land and try to imagine its historical potential. How did this look before modern humans came on the scene? It’s a good exercise for ranchers, and for everyone else that cares about our future.

 

pasture walking

wild range that was farmed
then planted back into grass 

How did this stream look in the days of the buffalo? 

rock wall built by my great grandfather
to generate hydro power
but abandoned in the early 1900's 

September Vows

Cole and Anna were married the first week of September, when summer was at her most brilliant. What a beautiful time for a wedding, if the weather holds that is. And hold it did. In fact, we had cool weather right up until the week of the wedding. Then as the forecast unfolded it got warmer and warmer to peak on the Saturday of the wedding. We were sweating after dark on the dance floor.

Two days later it all came crashing down – literally - with rain and high winds that felled mighty limbs on the site of the ceremony.

Turns out the ranch fixes up pretty good. Our cow pasture was glammed up by lights strung between poles in Cole’s carefully set out arrangement. Linen was draped over straw bales, a dance floor leveled on the grass. Being a grazing enthusiast, I have to say the pasture, which had been harvested once and allowed to regrow, was gorgeous and emerald green, the perfect backdrop to Anna’s color scheme of cinnamon and navy. Our native cottonwoods shaded, sheltered and cozied us all in their steadfast manner. Even the strawberry clover, which the photographer called wildflowers, were featured as foreground in the sunset photos.  

As a writer I love words. The word that comes to mind is providence, but what does it mean exactly? God or nature as providing protective or spiritual care.  Ah yes. It felt like that. Like nature held off as long as it could to bless a couple of kids, then let loose just to show us her power. It was humbling, just as it was humbling to witness these young people pledge their futures to one another while basking in the warm embrace (covid friendly mind you) of their family and friends as they embark on what they know will be, at times, rocky seas.

Because of the pending festivities, Mark finally took the time to finish the steps and retaining walls off the back of the house. Now that he’s done the heavy lifting, I can fret and fuss over the plants that live there for the rest of my days. As you read this, Mark, consider being told again how much I appreciate it.  

My vegetable garden was part of the decor. There was a row of sunflowers on one side and random flowers throughout. I planted the cosmos one year and now they voluntarily come up wherever they want. This year I gave the seedlings a little more leeway and they were scattered around the cucumbers and beets with their pink and white blooms. Even the carrots and swiss chard knew to be pretty this year. A wedding was just the push I needed to get the dripline done as well.  

It was a precious experience, from the girl trip to Boise where we found the perfect gown in an out-of-the-way dress shop, to the last minute clasping of great-great grandma True’s pearls around her neck.

As I write this, Mark is in the kitchen putting some words together for his aunt’s funeral. She died the day before the wedding. My Mom died in September too. Actually, considering it all, September is a good month to pass over to the other side - and a good month to marry. As we put the finishing touches on summer, we celebrate another growing season’s production and store up for the future. One part is finishing up, maturing and cycling back into the soil. The other part is seed dispersal and the storing of energy in roots or pollen for food in the faith of chapters yet to come.

I have a line I use this time of year, “September breaks your heart.” And so it did again. Death always does, but a wedding does it as well. It breaks your heart wide open with all the love you can hold. It leaves bare the hopes and humility we always feel as parents. I know I speak for Cole's Mom and Dad as well, that as our children leave us and commit to a new partnership, the heaviness we feel is good and right, and only proves our rock solid support for their lives ahead. 

above photos by thistleandpinecreative

Taking our Turn

We spent a day in the hills checking the herd and putting out salt. I was the salt guy (gal?) and in my travels found what was left of an old homesteading cabin. The four walls were lying on the ground and in the middle was a dilapidated cookstove. The lettering on the stove said it was manufactured in St Louis, Missouri. That’s a long haul even before it got to the mountains of Idaho.

I had taken my wildflower ID book so I was able to identify a flower I hadn’t noticed before. It grows alongside yarrow, a ubiquitous white flower this time of year, and they look a lot alike. It never registered with me that it was a different species. My book said the new flower was yampah, and that the Native Americans had eaten the root tubers. I had my trusty shovel with me so I dug up some plants. The tubers tasted like carrots just like the book said. Mark said they were right tasty. 

How would anyone have survived living in a log cabin up here? And for the natives, how did they get the tubers without a shovel and for such little reward? We love this range and its many wonders. I have to keep in mind that we’re just taking our turn.

I stayed mostly inside today to avoid the heat. I went out for short spells and then back in to do housework, which is always waiting. I felt a little discombobulated until it occurred to me to bake a favorite of Mark’s, zucchini bread. If you like to bake, you’re probably making the recipe for two loaves which calls for 3 cups of flour and 2 cups of zucchini. Here’s a tip, use 3 cups of squash instead. The bread is more moist, healthier, and best of all it uses up more zucchini and that’s really the point, right?  

We're sleeping in the basement under a window and noticing the moonlight. I found a neat internet site called timeanddate.com that shows the times of the sun and moon rising and setting, and lots of other good information about day length, etc. What interests me most are the phases of the moon. It tells the exact illumination of the moon on the current day. Today is the new moon, but only 1.4% is visible, so we won’t be able to see it for another couple of days. Then it will be more correct to call it a young moon.  

My grandmother and great-grandmother both left behind diaries. They were very aware and appreciative of the natural world. Of course in those days, living off the land, they were absolutely dependent upon it, more so than us even though we derive our livelihood there as well. They listened for the first killdeer and meadowlark in the spring. They recorded the weather and the pulse of irrigating and harvesting on the farm. And they competed to be the first to see the new moon every month. I know to watch as the moon waxes to full, but know very little about the new moon. My ancestors didn’t have a website, they lived it. But I’ll take the help and try to catch up with them. 

yampah, so delicate and lovely

                                                             

they often have a double tuber

a tough way to live

Covid Gardening

I’ve been practicing - learning to change the things I can, and to accept the things I can’t. I’m also reminding myself that other people get to choose how they spend their days. I get to choose how I spend mine. We all need to practice personal responsibility of course and work in teams, especially a marriage, but there’s plenty of margin around the edges to choose.

Why that particular thought belongs with covid gardening, I’m not sure. I’ve always had a garden, but in a pandemic it’s stylish again. Oh, so that’s why I ought to learn how to grow my own food! It's one of the silver linings to our current situation. Apparently covid gardens can go by other names more like the victory gardens of WWI and II - hope gardens, good news gardens. I like the term solace garden.

Planting and tending a vegetable garden, then harvesting and preparing food for the table is as real as real gets. I’m lucky that Mark appreciates my home-grown produce. He tells me he can eat all the swiss chard I can grow. He also loves beet greens with little beets attached to the end. We eat it all, right down to the roots. Bitter on top, then almost sweet at the end. Summer itself.

I like to include flowers with the vegies as well. This season it’s a row of sunflowers. They were doing wonderfully until yesterday when one stout, glorious fellow just fell over. When I investigated, I found insects had bored through the stem right at ground level. Now my perfect row has a hole in the middle of it. Mark said what he always says, “things are seldom ideal.”

Speaking of less than ideal circumstances, I took a drink from Mark’s water jug he had left in the front seat of the pickup. I felt something slide in my mouth and swallowed it; thought I was imagining things and took another swig only to have more slip down my throat. When I tipped the jug back an earwig was crawling by the mouthpiece. Yuck. The neighbor lady overheard me calling Mark to complain and suggested I call a nurse because the earwigs might burrow into my intestines. Not likely. I’m still alive and feeling fine. So - lesson learned. A word comes to mind when speaking of earwigs – interminable – and they are, so I’m sure many people have ingested them in their drinking water by mistake and lived to tell about it. When I went to bed last night I envisioned them crawling up my throat in my prone position.

Other July adventures included camping with my extended family. We reserved a large campground and arrived with a variety of tents (pup and family), campers (rented, old, new, deluxe), and a repurposed school bus (take away the s and h and it reads cool bus). We do like most families I suppose. Young adults bike and hike and tend kids, little kids explore and play in the dirt. Oldsters, of which I’m a member, prepare food and sit around the campfire telling stories. I broke ranks by going on a mountain bike ride with Seth, but I do love the campfire conversations. My niece said that’s why she goes camping with the family – for the stories. Bless her.

Like I said, I'm practicing - practicing gratitude most of all. And though the swallows are staging a good fight to use the porch for nesting, bugs are crawling and chewing, the heat has slowed grass regrowth to a crawl and the weeds are calling my name, I still walk around in awe of the headiness of mid-summer. We all know it won't last. I have a Buddhist saying near my keyboard, the trouble is you think you have time. July is like that. 

my solace garden

its been a great year for wild primrose 

Thinnings for supper

I counted a dozen ladybugs feasting on ragweed aphid

climbing cucumber tendrils,
 so delicate yet so strong

Callie enjoying Rich's cowboy coffee

this cow pasture is pollinator paradise

Classifying July 2020

We have a pair of cedar waxwings nesting in the quakie outside our office window. They were building the nest one day while we watched. The male, we assume, held on to his beakfull of cotton from the cottonwood trees while the female got hers safely secured in the nest. Then they put beaks together as he transferred his bundle to her for proper placement. We’ve always loved waxwings - so velvety, so creamy - and to have them nest right under our nose is a treat. 

After a cold spell it’s turned off hot again for Independence Day. It’s been wet, and all around us plant life is exploding. We live in the middle of chaos. There’s a willow-lined canal on one end, a cottonwood forest on the other, brushy dry sandhills, irrigated pastures, and lots of weeds and grasses. In simplified terms, with a variety and abundance of plant life (flora which get their energy from the sun) comes a variety and abundance of animals (fauna which breathe and forage for nutrition). In the middle of manicured farms, cattle fill the big animal niche and birds and insects thrive. On our end table is a grass book, a bird book, one on wildflowers, and a well-worn one on weeds.

Cotton is floating on the air again today. I’m pretty tired of it getting in my nose. As we walk around the ranch, putting up and taking down temporary fence, changing water and moving yearlings, different fragrances waft in and out of our awareness. The perfume from the tiny yellow blooms of the Russian Olive trees is especially pungent right now. The mountains have their own plethora of scents. When Mark got home from the range last night he said it smelled like an Avon commercial.   

We’ve been grazing the yearlings around the house. It’s one of my favorite times of the year - two weeks of watching them forage for nutrition from wherever I am around the house, the porch, the deck, or the kitchen with my morning coffee. They’re tromping around the perimeter of my vegetable garden right now, kept out by a single strand of electrified string - nerve wracking!

When the cattle change paddocks they eat the forbs first, those weedy/wildflower-like plants. They also like tree leaves, and of course grass, of which we have a multitude of varieties, quack, orchard, brome, timothy, etc. Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom, talks about the value of diversity in our diet and in the diet of grazing animals. Animals are hard wired to pick and choose a diet that is healthiest for them. We have the same ability, but it has mostly been lost in our hyper processed/over analyzed food culture.

We celebrated the 4^th by sitting on the deck and watching the full moon rise above the cattle at work. Out of the blue Mark asked me, "what pleases you about your life right now?" I enjoyed exploring that one, and then asked him the same question. His response: "times like these."  

Sometimes I get comments from readers about our way of life. They're very nice and complementary, as if what we do is something to cherish - and I suppose it is. But, truly, it is just life – with all its beauty and all its imperfections. The pandemic has brought this fact front and center - if one has enough to eat, health, and a home with a dose of freedom and security, we’re all in the same boat. I can be as unhappy (or happy) as anyone. 

Mark reminded me about Willie's song, Good Times. The last verse goes like this:

Here I sit with a drink and a memory,
But I'm not cold, I'm not wet, and I'm not hungry,
So, classify these as good times.
Good times.

a string protects my butterfly garden

. . . . and my vegetables

build it (let it grow) and they will come

Commencement

The Trail, as it’s called here on Pratt Ranch, went fine this year. Well, except for that first morning when the calves decided to head back home en masse, tails in the air, sure that Mom was back in the pasture we’d left an hour before. We tried and tried to get them to keep walking ahead, but more calves kept looking back and joining the group that was challenging us, then some cows joined in. We finally had to admit defeat and let them fall back to where Seth and Gus had thrown up some panels against a fence to head them off. We stopped, got them settled, and started again. Whew, that hasn’t happened in a while.

Seth and Anna were with us every mile of the drive. There’s nothing like home-grown help. There’s one section of the route that is especially challenging. We crest a mountain, tumble down to a creek on the other side, then follow a narrow lane through a steep-sided canyon. At the end is a field with lots of grass and a good rest for the herd, but the route is fraught with obstacles, a rushing creek to dive in and out of, cedars and rocks to hide behind, and no easy way to keep the cattle from slipping back past us. As Seth and Anna and I were bringing up the rear on that final leg, knowing the worst was behind us, Anna commented how “bad ass” the event was. I’m not really sure what that means but I think we done good.   

With cattle delivered to the mountains, summer can commence. Only now we’ll wear the road out going back and forth tending them. Mark has been back almost every day since. He and Seth are up there today. They had a couple of bulls with sore feet to bring home and they’ll ride through the calves for sickness.

Before the cows could arrive, the fences needed repaired. Last winter was a heavy snow year leaving our fence in shambles with many broken wires. Mark and I, knowing we weren't much of a threat, asked our kids for help. We made a plan for Memorial Day Weekend. They had helped us tuck the cattle in to a pasture mid-route for just long enough to get the holiday campers in and out before our final push to the range.

I gathered up all the fencing supplies I could find - wire stretchers, pliers, staple buckets and splice wire for everyone, and made ground beef soup to reheat for lunch. There was a skiff of snow on the ground.  Callie even came from Boise and we finished before day's end. These young adults get along well and are a joy to work with. 

We don’t know how our kids and their spouses will fit into the future of the ranch. Making it work for them and maintaining our livelihood is top priority. We know it will look different from how we did it and that’s okay. The kids have a wide breadth of education and experience and a big world that needs them too. Their love of the land and animals isn’t under debate, however. They’ve assured us that caring for the land will endure past our short time here and for that I say a prayer of thanks. 

women at work

many, many bluebells

Anna and her Dad

Anna on Sis, with Stella (in training)

Looking for Like Minds (and grass)

I’ve been searching for a word to describe the switch from winter to spring on a ranch. In the best sense “thrilling” fits the bill. That’s how it felt about two weeks ago, anyway. I was full of energy, bird-watching and following each tree species in the leafing-out competition. I was enjoying helping Mark burn ditches and pitch the debris as they fill with water for the first time. I was cutting rogue olives and burning limb deadfall with abandon. It was all such fun. Now, not so much, “overwhelming” is a better description. A sore neck and an hour-long nap two days in a row told me I had over extended my thrill. And I haven't even started on my vegetable garden.

It feels good knowing the irrigation water is flowing. I took my binoculars one afternoon to visit a pond that the ibis had found. A big group were feeding, picking their way along with their long legs, sticking their curved bills into the water over and over. Others were sleeping, standing on one leg, their heads turned backwards resting along their backs. I have never noticed the iridescent colors of their wings before. Ibis are otherworldy, a friend told me. With a dearth of natural wetlands, ibis take advantage of flood irrigation and we're tickled to oblige.

We’re starting with the cows out of the valley tomorrow and heading for grass in the mountains. Even though we have good help lined up, the 45-mile walk feels daunting. I’ll feel better when we get a day or two under our belts. It has always been thus, the anticipation is worse than the event itself.

In other news, Seth announced his job had been downsized due to the pandemic and he would be taking a break from the professional world to be a full time rancher for a month or more. His comment was, "their timing couldn't be better." We’ve all heard about silver linings to the virus and this is one for us.

We beef growers are learning a lot about our supply chain through "these trying times.” The hourglass shape of our industry - cow-calf producers on the front side, consumers on the end side, and the meatpacking plants in the middle - makes for vulnerabilities we haven’t tested before. Turns out those valiant souls that harvest our animals are especially vulnerable to the virus. They are the essential workers in our world. 

An interesting coincidence to the beef supply shake-up is that this spring our kids launched their Pratt Family Beef direct sales business. Mark has always had a few grass-fed cattle that stay home in the summer for customers interested in an alternative to our mainstream outlet through Country Natural Beef. Pratt Family Beef is a stepped-up version of that, and is reaching folks outside our usual circle. It amazes me that people send deposits to hold a product which is months away from their freezer. That's where social media comes in, including this 10-yr old blog, to introduce our family to potential customers.

Resiliency, partnerships, stability and sustainability – these are the attributes we’ve been students of for a long time now. It’s what we need to focus on world-wide instead of bickering and blaming. Well, actually it’s only some people that bicker and blame. Most of us are in the grand middle, the unflappable middle that buy their toilet paper one large package at a time. Unfortunately it’s the bickerers and blamers that get all the attention.

See you on the other side of grass.

photo by Anita

white-eyed ibis at work 

starting irrigation water, our lifeblood here on the home ranch 

Seth, Dave, Leah and Anna, branding as low- stress as we can muster

Callie and Anna, a last feeding day

Working from Home

Caring for cows during a pandemic looks a lot like caring for cows any other time. I’m feeling blessed to do what we do. We get to go outside and work with animals that know nothing about ventilators or face masks. They don’t worry about falling markets, social distancing or zoom calls. They've got "working from home" down pat. They look for the feed truck every morning, trusting that tomorrow will be the same as today. Mark and I are as concerned about this virus as anyone, but the weather has more to do with what happens on the ranch than anything else.

Calving numbers have peaked and we’re on the back side of the curve. But - “there’s always something." It’s a phrase we use often. Yesterday it was another set of twins and two babies that were born and didn’t suck. We walked them in and got them suckled and going. Most days the cattle calve like clockwork, on their own as nature planned, but not so yesterday.  

One day, just at dusk, a cow that Mark knew was preparing to calve had not made any headway all day. Seth tried to get her in on foot, but she was having none of it. Mark was tending a heifer, so Seth called me to bring a horse, and said he would stay with the cow so he wouldn’t lose her in the dark. I put Seth's saddle on Jane and rode her with my toes just barely touching the stirrups until I found him. He got the cow in and checked her out. Sure enough, the calf was upside down, meaning the head, which was below the legs, would never have entered the birth canal - a sobering outlook for the pair if we had waited until morning.

We've been moving the cow-calf pairs away from the "drys" every few days. It's social distancing for cows so they don't pass any sickness to one another. Yes, there's good reason to cancel our human gatherings for a while.  

I looked at seed catalogs today. Should I try some eggplant this year? How about a row of sunflowers on the edge of the garden? A rainbow blend of carrots would be fun, and there’s a cylindrical beet that’s good for canning. We have a wedding in our future, so a row of Queen Anne’s lace would lend a nice touch to bouquets.

I felt so much like my Mom today, not only about the seed catalogs, but for the hardy noon meal I fixed - fried pork chops, red spuds from the garden (yes, they’re still good), flour gravy and creamed corn, which I had picked and frozen last summer. The only thing missing was Mom’s homemade bread, which left a pretty big hole if you think about it. I felt like her again this afternoon piling limbs to burn out under the big cottonwoods. She loved to work outside like I do.

Seth said this pandemic is likely the most globally disruptive event of his lifetime. I hope so, but I'm afraid we may be challenged again and some more. The loss of species across the globe isn't as front and center as coronavirus, but it's more deadly long run. The human race has always seen times of hardship, but now we experience those hardships globally. We depend on one another so much. It is our strength - and our weakness.

I believe our kids, and their young peers across the planet, are up to the task. I found a phrase in my daily reader that's very fitting. It said to switch from fear and uncertainty to faith and confidence. We can do that, right? The younger generation is talented, ambitious and courageous. They think collectively and believe we’re better together. Let's help them.     

Leah coaxing some babies across a ditch

a neophyte mom pretty excited with her baby

Riding the Edge

I took the day off one Sunday before calving got in full swing and spent the whole day reading a book my brother brought me. It’s called, Riding the Edge of an Era, Growing Up Cowboy on the Outlaw Trail by Diana Allen Kouris. I knew I had to read it when I saw Rich’s words scrawled inside the front cover, “Really good author, very sad story. I can’t talk about it without crying.”

It was sad indeed. But happy, too, as the author described her childhood in the 1950’s on the Brown’s Park Livestock Ranch in the three corners region of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. The ranch was remote. Winters were spent in Rock Springs where the kids went to school, summers in glorious freedom on the ranch.   

The author speaks of her Mom, a great cook and homemaker, and who could ride horses with the best of the men. She talks of the warmth that her mom “forever lit inside” her daughter - just by loving her and making her know how much she was wanted. So simple and so important. Gifts my parents gave me unequivocally, and that I thought every kid got.

She talks of the animals she grew up with, Phillychich, the pet rooster that attacked Grandma on the way to the outhouse, Comet, the buckskin that liked to rub off his unsuspecting rider on the nearest low-hanging branch, and Hobo, the genteel gelding, that became a favorite mount when Diana returned to the ranch every year to help her brother with the fall roundup.

The story settled in my chest just as it did for my brother Rich. It was close to home, almost too close. Memories of our own Mom and Dad come to mind. Mom wasn’t a horsewoman, but she shared many characteristics with the matriarch in the story - faithful and steadfast, they both turned to preserving history in their later years. Our Dad was softer than the father in the story, but both men were defined by the ranches they operated.

The author’s childhood was more rough and tumble than mine. We’re both the youngest of our siblings, but her brother kept her in trouble, my sisters were easy on me. We kids spent all our time outside, though, as she did. We explored the ranch, rode horses and moved irrigation pipe. We swam in the irrigation ditch every day, running back to the house to drop on the warm sidewalk for a sunbath, our wet suits leaving a bikini smudge on the cement.

Diana and her sister kept riding with their ranching brother even though the girls were women now and had husbands and children in town. These stories are so familiar! Riding in the cold until your bottom half is numb. Rain snaking down the seams of your slicker. Facing your fears on a spirited horse and coming out the others side unscathed. Long, challenging days where you test the limits of personal exhaustion. And the exhilaration of getting to the end of your task for the day, the cattle gathered, sorted, processed, or shipped. 

Bob, the brother, who follows their Dad on the property, is the quintessential rancher. On those miserably frigid days on horseback, everyone took a turn in the warm pickup but him. Doing the impossible on a horse, fighting and figuring and putting up with the muck and misery. He reminds me of my brother and Mark, old-fashioned ranchers for sure, always willing to do what the business requires of them.

  

But ranchers get old and fortunes change. Sometimes the government comes for your land as it did the Allen family. They persevered through this and more, but time kept ticking for the ranch they loved.

Ranches don’t have to last. In fact only 3% make it past the 4th generation. We’re on number four ourselves. Our story is still being written.   

Rich as a young man

Soils R Us

If one soils workshop during the off-season is good, two is even better, right? So we went to Idaho Falls and then Burley to learn and question and scratch our heads. Now we talk about soil health over coffee in the morning while it’s too dark to feed cows.

Who knew there’s a whole teeming world of microbes below our feet, and they have the power to create, maintain and regenerate above-ground health. Not only for plants, but animals that depend on plants - including humans.

The five elements of soil health are easy to understand and should be familiar to all of us that have a yard, enjoy the landscape, like clean air and water, and eat food:

1 – Keep the soil covered with dead or living plants

2 – Minimize disturbance to the soil, like tilling

3 – Promote a diverse variety of plants

4 – Keep a living root in the soil year round

5 – Graze with livestock responsibly  

But wait, Anna says we talk too much about soils so I’ll change the topic.

We’re taking a class this winter put on by the University of Idaho on ranch transition planning. Our first assignment is to individually write a legacy statement. Basically what you hope to leave to succeeding generations. How you want to be remembered. What values did you live your life by?

Mark and I had a half-hour to kill in town so we stopped by a sunny window and put pen to paper. It’s not easy to sum up a life, even for a writer like me, so I can imagine the other ranchers in the class struggling with the composition.

One thing I thought of was my intention that Mark and I be a good role model of partnership to our children. We both are “all in” for this ranch, which is good, but it leads to arguments about how to manage it. I like to talk things through, be pragmatic. When expenses come up I often ask, can we afford it? He prefers to figure it out on his own and gets annoyed with my questions.  

But he is kind to me. When it's really cold, one of the sweetest things he does is put his gloves on the pickup heater while I feed my load of hay every morning. Then we swap gloves when I'm half-way through so my hands stay cozy and warm. What a difference this small gesture makes. It makes me feel loved and cared for. Happy Valentines Day!

A shovelful of good stuff from the Back Forty

Mid-Winter Rant

When the Holidays are done, and grazing is left behind, we nestle into a quiet routine of feeding cows every morning. If the weather cooperates, we get to do a few other things besides ranching, like go to a movie or take a drive. We took the afternoon off yesterday and drove north towards the Tetons. We hoped the weather would lift, but it spit slush at us the whole way. Then of course we couldn't see the mountains. Plus the snow sculptures in Driggs were well past their beauty. Oh well, it was a diversion from ranch duties and we had a nice supper out.

I’m feeding one big load of hay per day to the young cows who are expecting their first or second calf. I call it my “feeding practice,” like a yoga or meditation “practice.” The bales can be challenging to get off the truck one slice at a time. One must keep calm, use your body intentionally and resist the urge to fight. I really love the work. Mark drives for me so it’s time together and I get fresh air and exercise. The best part is walking home from ranch headquarters when that first load is done. Mark and the rest of our crew finish up without me. As I walk along in the quiet, I see our home up ahead and feel a rush of pleasure at the day stretching out ahead of me, the lusciousness of winter with time to do indoor jobs. Spring can take her time, if you ask me.

The snow came and then the wind blew it into big drifts. Now it’s warmed up and everything is soft. You can tell what temperature it is outside just by the look of it. Warm-up means the colors deepen. Tree trunks are dark against a white winter sky. Grasses show golden as they poke through the snow. Calves in the pasture lot spread out across the field, chewing their cud and laying in the snow. Magpies and dark-eyed juncos flit about.

Winter also gives us time to read, follow the news, take some rat trails on the internet, listen to podcasts, etc. There’s some crazy stuff out there. I think as more and more people live detached from the natural world they start to go a little nuts.     

There’s a billboard on a highway close-by which features a forlorn looking dog, and in bold letters these words, “bring me inside.” Well, it depends on the breed of course, but a dog house filled with straw and positioned out of the wind suits our dogs just fine. It's really about feed, water and shelter. The billboard is communicating in sound bites, an infuriating habit we’ve become accustomed to. Where is nuance and the ability to think something through logically?

Because of my choices over time, my Facebook feed sends me a lot of stuff on regenerative agriculture which I appreciate. I also get the anti-meat stories. The Golden Globes banned meat from their pre-show dinner for the first time ever this year. Not that one meal would make a difference, they said, but to send a message about climate change. What they don't know is that this isn't about plant vs. animal foods. Both processes CYCLE carbon. Tell me how the food is produced, the soils, the biodiversity, the community it sustains, and then we can have the conversation about climate. The Golden Globe event, along with vegan dishes, served bottled water - from Iceland. But wait, in the spirit of climate consciousness, it was in glass bottles instead of single-use plastic like the company normally sells. And they’re going to reuse the red carpet this year. Did I say the world has gone crazy?

We're popular to some

Early January

Cycling local carbon

A 2020 Welcome

After we fed cows this morning, the snow started. It’s falling heavily now, and with it, the quiet that accompanies this familiar winter scene has enveloped the ranch. Now it looks like Christmas.

Any self-respecting ranch blog should mention a game we played over the holidays. It’s called The Game of Things. Each card is a prompt: “things that are bumpy,” “things you never told your parents,” “things you don’t want to find under the couch,” etc. Then everyone writes a secret response and we try to guess who wrote what. We laughed a lot. One prompt said, “things you don’t want to hear in the middle of the night.” Three of us answered, “the cows are out.” Interestingly it was from three women, one from each generation, Anita, me and Anna. Hmmmm.

I love the clean slate of a new year. What will 2020 hold? Last year, 2019, was a big year for our family. Seth got married, Anna got engaged and finished her master's degree, Callie’s restorative exercise business took off. Mark and I took on interests on and off the ranch. These years are precious – as is every year, but turning 60 in 2019 brought the passage of time into focus for me and I’m more stingy of how I spend it. Well, maybe stingy is a poor way to describe it. Let’s say I’m more “generous” to the efforts I value the most, and more “mindful” of the rest.  

Winter is the only chance we get to dig into our ranch finances. We’re trying to figure costs per cow right now. A large whiteboard leans against the piano in our living room with expense categories on the left and dollars on the right. The board stares at us as we linger over coffee in the morning. I’m very visual, and looking at the figures over a few days helps me grasp the total picture. Plus, these costs aren't straightforward. They take focused thinking to analyze.

We’ve been moving and sorting cows and calves, getting them set up for winter feeding. We fed our first load of hay on New Year’s Day. Of course we’d rather graze year round, but there’s something comforting about knowing feed for the herd comes from the stackyard for awhile. The chores don't change much from day to day until calving starts. Unless we get severe weather and Mark needs to push snow, this time of year gives us some mental bandwidth to consider other ranch parameters.  

Anna brought a friend to visit the ranch who was taking her Christmas break from the military. Taylor flies helicopters which sounds pretty exciting, but she thought a ranch stay might be an interesting interlude. After feeding three loads of hay one morning, the young women stopped by the corral to give Penny a pet. Penny was born prematurely and we had to help her stand and nurse for several weeks. She didn't have enough hair to keep her warm so she wore a second hand sweater. She's all grown up now with a calf of her own, but she’s still as gentle as can be. We call her “Old Pen.”

When we feed, Mark shows me cows that I’ve featured in my blog. I’ve forgotten them but he remembers each one. The one that calved early as a heifer over to the Pease place in 2013, number X14, stands out because she’s always in the lead and likes to scratch on the big bales on the truck as we enter the feed ground. V7 is a Hereford that I blogged about when Mark was tagging calves one spring. Apparently I engraved the tag on the wrong side because it’s backwards now. You can tell who she is, just get behind her!

The rhythm of a ranch goes on. Past the first snowfall and the last snowfall. Past Christmas festivities, and on into future planning. Cows that cycle through our herd bearing calves year after year and then aging out.  A brand new year reminds me of what Gary says about ranching, "it’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”

101 year old barn 

Taylor and "Old Pen"

Too funny