Life On The Ranch:
It was a beautiful, calm, crisp morning when we prepared to gather the cows from their pasture into the pens were we would give each one an ultrasound to see which ones are going to be having a baby calf this next year? I (Denver) caught and saddled my horse Cola, pulled on my riding boots over my double socks(Cause it was chilly) and we road out. The cows were calm and agreeable so the round up went well, we didn't have to take them far because we had scheduled it so that their grazing rotation put them right by the corrals.
We ate some quick breakfast at the corrals after the cattle were penned. We then turned to the main event and split into our different positions. David ultrasounds the cows, someone writes down the results, and the rest of us work together to navigate the cows to and through the working chute. "Preg checking" is what we call it, and it's a big day, but with good weather, a good bread up, and being able to all work together, it was pretty great! The weather has been very dry the past few months, but the previous day held a little sprinkle of rain so we didn't even have to deal with dust, Praise God!
We took a break to eat some sandwiches around noon, but otherwise things keep moving so the cows can get back out to pasture.
Once every cow has had her ultrasound, and things are picked up and put away David and I usually go over the results with Dad. We'll talk about things like which age groups preformed better or worse and the possibilities of why that might be. Or what could be improved and different things we could try. There's something about looking at results that gets the wheel turning in a persons head.
We all strive to be good stewards, make improvements, and keep things moving forward in a regenerative way. A lot of the time this takes some faith as much of what we do is hard to quantify, but other times you can see evidence that progress is happening. When it comes to the health of the cow heard nothing is quite as telling of where you're at then the bread up, so this makes preg checking an important time to see how we are doing at taking good care of the cattle. Now we could pour on every input and feed product available to our cows: Corn, Protein tubs, Multi Mineral shots, antibiotics, etc. Or we could avoid synthetic man made inputs and work with nature to bring health to our cattle.
The latter has been our philosophy for many years, the conventional model was making less and less sense, so our Dad made the decision to quit the feed store inputs. But transitioning was not as smooth as you'd think, you see inputs are like Band-Aids and when your rip them off all at once, significant bleeding will occur. This was our experience with switching paradigms and it showed the most in the cattle's pregnancy rates which sadly took quite a hit for years. I'm still impressed that my Dad was able to stay the course he had embarked on.
Year by year, little by little, bread ups improved (thank goodness). This year our cattle bred up with similar rates to before the Band-Aids were ripped off. I think that is testimony to a cow heard with real health, because they are able to preform at the same level that they use to, without all the extra inputs, crutches, and Band-Aids that they use to have. You could argue that we still give the cows inputs. But the few "inputs" we use today are meant to work with nature, like the sea salt mineral water we've talked about before, we have also started implementing homeopathic remedies into our cattle health program.
Sale Promotion:
We're excited to announce that beef is now available on the website, but here's the good part, the next 20 orders will get a free pound of beef liver added on. If you have been thinking of trying our beef, now would be a good time... unless you do not want any liver.
