Spring gets Underway

Spring is bearing down on us. Thank goodness Mark is good natured even in the heat of battle. With a suite of chores to attend to each day - feeding, calving, burning ditches, shipping calves and upgrading irrigation facilities, he methodically tackles each task in order of priority and for the most part keeps his positive attitude.

Me, well I worry too much and think I need to have things a certain way. For a few months every spring and summer that’s a fool’s game. Better to take a breath and trust that we’ve done it before - this year will work out just fine too.

I planted two triple rows of peas which made me feel better. Might as well take advantage of an early spring!   

I slipped away for a day and a half to attend a gathering of range professionals organized as the University of Idaho Rangeland Center. We discussed ways to further range improvement efforts in the state. I’m the lucky one who serves in an advisory capacity and gets to give my opinion, then go home and leave the real work to the pros. 

On the drive home I stopped at Massacre Rocks State Park to see how the grass was coming and ran into Kevin Lynott, the manager there. He’s a grass enthusiast like me so we have plenty to talk about. He showed me an implement he designed and had built that is pulled behind a 4-wheeler to assist in broadcast seeding of native grasses. The Backcountry Mechanical Vector (BMV) Sweet 16 features a mower blade mounted on the end of each of 16 arms which are designed to float over rocks and lightly disturb the soil. Following each blade is a length of chain which scratches the surface as well. He runs it before and after broadcast seeding and has gotten great results. All he’s missing now is some cows to maintain the perennials. And he, in fact, agrees with me!

With all the challenges we face as range managers - fire, invasives, endangered species, drought, etc., it’s good to know there are fine people all around the state like Kevin at State Parks, Neil, Amanda and Glenn in Extension, Karen and Lovina at the University of Idaho, and others, all dedicated and doing their darndest to figure out solutions.

it happens every spring

Kevin and his BMV Sweet 16

without cattle hooves to disturb the soil - the next best thing

still cleaning the occasional barn stall and finding beauty there

Not Belize

Seth and Leah spent their spring break at the ranch. Yesterday as we were riding horses through the Wapello sandhills, we joked about their choice of destination during their week-long college vacation. “There was sand, maybe not beach sand . . . but still!”

They successfully pulled two calves, one backwards and one with a leg back, then delivered a pair of tangled twins that didn’t make it. They weighed yearlings; Leah learning how to run the scales. They moved pairs, which was a semi-wild affair with young babies and concerned mothers. And on their last day of break they moved drys, those cows still to calve, to new pastures. Oh, and they fed cows of course. Leah got the hang of the new used diesel truck and figured out it’s pretty easy to keep Seth on the bed and to steer around the calves.

We made a drive up to our summer range at 6500 ft elevation. It was pretty sobering when you know that on a normal year we would still be snowed out at 5500 ft. We were kicking up dust most of the way. We stopped at Brush Creek to look around and Seth snuck up on slumbering cutthroat trout on a quiet waterway that should be rushing with snow melt.

We had some good conversations throughout the week. You always will if you spend time with Seth. He is a homebody with an international focus, if that’s possible. I guess we all have divergent parts of our personality, but his are more pronounced than most. Leah is just good company, cheerful to tag along at whatever needs done.  

They're grappling with those difficult career, educational, relationship decisions that all young people face. Seth graduates in May and then what? I wish we could reassure them that even though next steps seem life altering, massive, monumental, that in truth things will work out fine if, as Gary says, "you'll just let 'em." There's lots of time and room to make mistakes and make corrections and figure it out on the fly. Two more able kids we cannot imagine.  

It was grand having them here. I don’t know how they felt about using their spring break to help us. But, after all, they’re at that stage where they delight in each other’s company no matter what they’re doing. Remember that?

Twin Work

We had three sets of twins enrolled in the ranch's risk management program. Today we collected on one set.

Mark found a dead calf this morning that he thinks had both front legs back. Luckily the cow was okay. Mark loaded the dead calf and fetched the cow to the barn with his favorite mount, Jane. He then skinned the calf while I milked out the cow and tried to suckle one of the twins on her.

To “suckle” means just as you’d expect, put the cow in a head-catch and put the calf to her udder. The baby was having none of it though. He probably wasn't hungry enough and when they’re a few days old they don’t like being handled and can refuse to nurse. I tied the cow’s leg back but she was still trying to kick and scared him even more.  

I got a good pitcher of the cow’s colostrum, her first milk. Just like humans, the mother’s first milk is loaded with antibodies and critical for the calf’s future immune system. And in fact, things need to go pretty right because the calf’s stomach can only absorb these antibodies in the first 12 hours or so of life, so getting up and sucking right away is crucial.We like to have extra colostrum on hand for this very reason as once in awhile we might need to step in and help. We have an old relic of a refrigerator, the kind with a lever handle, in the barn to store the milk.

Even though the grafted calf didn’t want to suck just yet, Mark put the skin on it and poured a little O-NO-MO on his head. It’s a product that claims “orphan no more,” and is made from granular dried placenta. It must taste salty as the cows lick it and start to bond with the calf. This cow licked as intended and then hummed to her now reincarnated calf - that motherly, soft coaxing murmur we hear only when a mother addresses her baby. Cows don’t say much, but this vocalization is unmistakable. 

Speaking of twins, we celebrated Jesse’s kids’ third birthday today. It was a nice gathering of family and friends with pizza, ice cream and cake, and lots of March sunshine coming through their south facing windows. It’s fun to watch Jesse with his kids. I even think - yes I’m sure of it - I heard him humming to them once or twice today.   

beautiful and thick

she thinks she thought of him

It Must be March

It’s raining calves here on the ranch. Mark has a running tally and tags the newcomers when they are one day old. 

The cows expecting their first or second calf are in one field, the veteran mothers in another. Mark keeps a close watch on the heifers, the neophytes, but lets them all calve on their own for the most part. He walks a thin line, letting them do what nature has equipped them so well for, and also being around should they need assistance. If there’s a problem, it’s most likely a mal-presentation, a leg back, head down, etc. In these cases we fetch a horse and walk the cow into a nearby corral and haul her to the barn for help.

We have two sets of twins so far. They come at the front end of calving season, arriving early like human twins will. The cow is okay nursing two for a while until they get too big, then we’ll steal one to graft on another cow that loses a calf as the season progresses. We keep the twins and their moms in the corral so they get extra feed. In closer quarters away from the larger herd it’s also easier for them to keep track of each other.

Jesse and I arrived with two trucks to the feed ground today and found Mark with a grin on his face. He had been out checking cows on his 4-wheeler. “Guess what I saw this morning?” I thought he was going to tell us about a coyote or eagle scavenging on the calving ground. Instead he told us that while making his early rounds, and while the frost was settled all across the sagebrush to the east, and there wasn't a cow in sight . . . all of a sudden a shaft of steam burst upwards out of the brush. A new life! He had caught that cool moment from a totally different visual vantage point - when the calf slips from the birth canal surrounded with warm amniotic fluid and breathes its first breath.

It's happening on and off all day and night for a while. A mini-drama in a world of cows.

The mother of the twins, not so sure about entering the barn

getting used to two

this one is taking too long and might need help

The Capitol of Light

I was feeling discombobulated on Sunday morning. It was hard to come home from a weeklong visit to our state capitol and find myself on the back of a feed truck in a piercing wind. But now it’s Tuesday and I’m back in the swing of things.  

We’ve been to the capitol building several times over the years. When the kids were little they loved climbing up and down the great marble stairways and standing in the rotunda, looking down over the railing to the bottom floor and up, up, to the tip-top of the dome. But this visit was special. As a member of this year’s class of Leadership Idaho Agriculture I got to tour the capitol in a somewhat official capacity.

We attended meetings of both the House and the Senate Agriculture Committees and visited the offices of the State Controller and the Attorney General. We walked around the Senate Chambers and the floor of the House. Our guide, Dorita, is on a first name basis with all the dignitaries including the chairs of the most powerful committee in the legislature, the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee (JFAC). Our timing was perfect as we arrived just as JFAC was adjourning, so we were able to have some time with the co-chairs, Representative Bell and Senator Cameron, before they hurried to their next engagement. They explained the challenges of setting the state budget and said that since Idaho is a balanced budget state the legislators can’t go home until the debits and credits line up.

The capitol was constructed in 1905 and due for an update in 1998 when the legislature approved a massive renovation/restoration effort. The building was restored inside and out and two new wings were constructed underground to the east and west. This allowed the existing footprint to stay the same. The only above ground structures visible over the hidden wings are the string of skylights modeling those of the original building. Because of the many skylights, a favorite of architect John Tourtellotte who along with Charles Hummel created the original design, the capitol is filled with light. It bounces around the white marble and shows off the deep mahogany accents.

Tourtellotte’s skylights were intentional, not only to illuminate the inner beauty of the building, but as a template for governance. His words ring true today, a hundred years after his work was realized: ”the great white light of conscience must be allowed to shine and . . . make clear the path of duty. . .”

It Depends

I welcomed the red wing blackbirds back this week. I always think that “chortle” describes the sound they make, but I wondered if I had made that word up so I looked for it in a real old fashioned dictionary. Yup, it’s a word. It means “gleeful chuckling.” I took a photo of one of the newcomers sitting on a power line for this blog because one can appreciate only so many photos of cows eating hay. You can almost see the blackbird in the photo.

It was beautiful this morning. It has been in the 50’s and 60’s for days. Good grief. I want more winter. Our farm depends on in-flows to the river between the reservoir in the upper reaches and our valley home, so we need snowpack that feeds the soil profile throughout the spring. I look towards the mountains and see the snow receding before my eyes and I’m concerned. I can’t be like the town folk I see out rollerblading and celebrating the warm weather. It’s a burden sometimes to live off the land. 

I travel to my last week of Leadership Idaho Agriculture tomorrow. We spend time at the state capitol in Boise and meet our hard working legislators. I'm part of a panel doing a mock presentation in favor of labeling genetically modified organisms, GMO’s. I’ve been researching and the topic is huge.

So are you for or against them, GMO’s I mean? For me the answer is a resounding – it depends. It’s like home schooling, divorce, couples living together before marriage, and on and on - life actually. Tell me HOW you do it. Then I’ll tell you if I agree or not.

Of course the technology is here to stay. I think it holds vast potential to help this planet address what it faces in the future – drought, hunger, depleted soils, etc. Examples like the new Innate potato from Simplot, that through the addition of DNA from a wild potato makes it possible to turn off the tendency to bruise in transport or to go brown when cut, seem pretty benign to me.

But then we go to herbicide resistant crops which make up the bulk of genetically modified organisms and I become skeptical. Okay fine plant them, but good soil management practices and biodiversity should be our first priority, not year after year of spraying Round-up and now 2,4-D and Dicamba because our crops can now withstand it 

Then in my research I read about cloned holstein dairy cows in China and Argentina. Scientists have added human DNA and created cows that produce milk which is 80% the equivalent of human breast milk. That makes me squirm. Somewhere we need to stop, don’t we? Can anyone hear it but me? The screaming for common sense? You can’t replace mom with a GM cow? Ack!  

my gmo-free morning walk 

Wild about "Wild"

It was 63 degrees today - balmy for February. I have a certain dread about it. But hey, it’s wet right now so best not to buy trouble. On this date last year there was a bitter wind, snow cover, and it was 3 degrees below zero.

The meadowlarks are singing. Well, one anyway. Yesterday I couldn’t be sure of what I heard, but today on the feed ground the calls were unmistakable. We know these fine fellows can winter here, as we’ve seen groups of them flitting about the stackyard as we’re going back and forth feeding cows. But it is only when spring threatens that they go off by themselves and sing the melody we all know by heart.   

We had such fun last night watching public TV’s, Earth a New Wild. Wow, finally a show about the natural world that wasn’t a doomsday prediction. The show takes us from the Maasai in Kenya and a bat community in Austin, Texas, to black footed ferrets in South Dakota and the odd looking saiga antelope of Russia. The show celebrates man and his place within nature - as an active and caring participant.

We learned about the cherished cows of India, and that when they succumb to natural causes, their carcasses are moved to the outskirts of the city and left to decay. Their remains, once picked sanitizingly clean by hordes of vultures, are now rotting slowly, a putrid sight attracting feral dogs because the vultures are gone. Turns out they died from medicine given to the cows which left residuals in the meat. Once the medicine was banned, and with the help of man, the vultures are returning.

Another story profiled the reindeer of Norway and the hardy people that depend on them for their livelihood. Grazing keeps the tundra alive as the reindeer dig for lichen through the snow. Man assists by castrating some of the males. These males remain vigorous throughout the tough winters since they don’t expend energy on mating. They “break trail” through the ice to get at the lichen making way for the weaker animals of the herd to find food.

The second hour of the film concentrated on The Plains. And three (count’em three!) of the examples showed cows playing an important role in improving and maintaining landscapes that benefit wildlife. The host, Dr. M. Sanjayan, a conservation ecologist, admitted that he had been wrong in the past thinking that cattle and abundant wildlife could not exist in the same space.

I know of course that modern American ranching has its drawbacks. On our ranch we don’t herd cattle like the Maasai or keep our animals bunched like the Montana rancher profiled in the movie. Still, we keep learning, working on shortening the grazing period while lengthening the recovery period as much as we can within the constraints we find ourselves in.   

Our favorite story of the movie was about our hero, Allan Savory, from Zimbabwe, who founded the principles of Holistic Management and introduced the world to planned grazing whereby the needs of the “whole” are tended. Allan is shown in his homeland walking barefoot beside an elephant. He describes the need for more cattle, not less, if we want to reverse biodiversity loss and reinvigorate the brittle grasslands of the world. The key is managing those cattle.

It makes me happy to see an ecologist celebrate Savory’s work. Dr. Sanjayan, upon his visit to the Zimbabwean ranch which is populated with cows and wildlife, called the results, "spectacular.”

The show will continue on February 11. It and any repeat of the first episode should be required viewing, a place to start a conversation without arrows, but with hope.  

putting away some not so wild escapees