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Early February Pictures from a frosty desert

leanin' H

Well-known member
It's been clear and sunny out this way for the past week. The snow we had has went into the ground thanks to days in the upper 30's. It still hits single digits at night but hasn't been bitter cold. Thought I'd post a few pictures of how thing look around here. I have an 86 year old neighboring rancher that is one of the finest guys I know. He is salt of the earth and a great guy. I help him whenever I can. This mornin' I went out and helped him feed his cows. The frost on the meadow gives away where we came from.
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The feed truck which Cal drives and I work as the bale proccessor.
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Stringing out the oat hay for the cattle. He runs 70 odd head of crossbred cows on private meadows and some foothill country.
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The gals had a good scatter to them. One honk of the horn and they headed our way.
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Half the load was oats and the other half is tall wheat grass cut and baled before it gets to stemmy. It makes decent enough feed for being old rangy grass. The trick is get it while it's young and palatable. The cows slick it up.
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Looking back toward Cal's home. It's a pretty spot to spend almost a century being a great steward of land and family. He is a fine friend!
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The remnants of our snow where it drifted along a fence. It is still better than 3 feet in spots.
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Now a few of the goings on around my own place. I started calving and have 4 so far. It is perfect weather for calving and I hope they all come in the next couple of weeks. A cow that I really like and her heifer calf.
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A 1st calf heifer who had the first calf of the year for us.
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Her bull calf soaking up the mornin' sun.
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I had planted a bunch of posts and ties before the ground got frozen and I have been working on a stackyard and a division fence when the weather allowed all winter. I'll feed right out of the stackyard when I get the manger finished. I still need to add some mini-trackhoe tracks along the bottom as a toe kick.
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A gate that will end up going into a finishing corral/calving parlor when I get it all finished.
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And a shot of the division fence I've been working on. I need to get the last of the pine poles attached over the net wire and add a barb across the top. My work crew is lazy and not well motivated. I'd fire the guy but he works really cheap. :wink: Enjoy your evening.
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Hayguy

Well-known member
real nice pictures, and i thought i was the only low tech guy on here that still feeds square bales off the back of a truck. really like your stack-yard manger idea, you could feed and not have to start a thing, at minus whatever that would be a real plus.
 

LazyWP

Well-known member
Great pictures! Yours and Cal's cattle look to be in great shape. I do have a question for you though. What is it with you guys in the high desert that stay with all the manual labor when feeding? My Father in law does the same thing. I start whining when I have to handle 5 or 6 hundred of the dumb things a year, of coarse I never touched them until 5 years ago, so I just try to man handle them. Lisa, who is about half my size, sorta likes working with them, and is never as worn out after we stack a load as I am.
 

George

Well-known member
Back in the 60s I fed small bales but I was always by my self so I took the beaters off an old manaure spreader and I would back it into the barn and remove the strings and drop about 20 loose bales into the spreader. My tractor was a WD Allis Chalmers with a "heat houser" and I hooked up a grader blade to it and then the ground driven spreader to the blade.

I would turn the floor on about mid speed and drop the blade clearing an 8' wide run that the bales dropped into.

Every day got a clean place for hay and I was able to care for about 55 head that way by myself.

Now I have a 277 cat with heat and air and 18"wide low ground pressure tracks so I just feed about every 10 days and move the feeders every time but I still walk thru my cattle a couple of times a day. You old west guys will laugh but I only have 3 cows I can't walk up to and scratch. But when yo only have 40 to 50 they get quite tame. Very easy to work with if the need arises. My cattle don't pay any attention to me or my german shepherds but let a stranger come in that is a different story.

Any one wanting to see my dogs can go to www.germanshepherdkingdom.com I breed for "silver gray" AKC regestered as "silver sables" but get a few traditional black and tans.
 

gcreekrch

Well-known member
Brown grass, baby calves, snow in the shade and on the mountains, feeding hay, kinda like the first of May here. :roll:

Cattle are sure in good condition, you make your feeding regime any easier and Mrs H is going to have to cut your rations back. :wink:
 

Northern Rancher

Well-known member
We bought some squares for the horses-the girls were amazed that you could break the twine without a knife-I said not the first one I've seen. They are kind of fun to feed in small amounts lol. When I was a kid I hauled them out to the cows in a sled behind my skidoo it worked pretty well. Now the outfitters drive the market crazy buying them up-the guys who make them sure know how to make light bales lol.
 

George

Well-known member
At the hay auctions around here good round bales stored indoors are bringing around $100.00 per ton and small squares are bringing around $200.00 per ton - - - - even some of the small lots that are not weighed are bringing $5.00 per bale for grass and $10.00 per bale for alfalfa which is about $330.00 per ton if they are 60# bales!

Can't be wastfull at those prices - - - if you are selling you have to love those horse people$$$$$
 

leanin' H

Well-known member
Cal is like a lot of guys out here who run around 100 head. They already have the baler and don't want to re-equip to run big bales. Cal actually doesn't have equipment and has his farming done by another guy. I haul a lot of hay for them using a balewagon. Back in the 80's we'd haul and stack between 4 and 5 hundred ton by hand. No wonder the wrestling program at the high school was awesome! :D All them farm kids was tough. I buy both big and small bales for my place depending on who i get them from. But as a really little outfit it makes ZERO sense at this point to invest in a tractor and proccessor. I spend all winter feeding out of my stackyard into a manger and 1 day using a tractor to clean up manure and spread it. Now when I get a thousand head, I'll change my tune. :wink:

One great thing about "horse people" is that while premium hay is through the roof, I get a lot of feeder hay for cows by buying the top and bottom bales or rained on hay. Horse hay around here is about $6 to $8 bucks a bale but feeder hay is still in the $75 dollar range per ton.
 

leanin' H

Well-known member
Northern Rancher said:
One way to get from really small to really big is not to overinvest in iron.

The first year I bought big square bales, you'd a thought i was drunk. I had the guy who delivered them stack them for me along a manger. But they were three high and it's tough to fork hay from three stories up. So I hooked a chain around the top bale and a stout rope from my '84 chev to the chain and "unloaded" them down to ground level. I even pushed a big straw bale about three hundred yards across the snow using my front bumper as a plow. But I got it out to where i wanted to scatter it for bedding for calves. :D As a certified lazy guy, I couldn't pack it out there by hand. :D I got a reputation to think about. :wink: With these mid sized square bales I can pry them down with a long pipe. Or Mrs. H does it! :wink:
 

jodywy

Well-known member
trades my super 1049 NH stack liner for my HN650 round baler . that practaly gave away 2 1283 self propelled balers for a $1000 each with all the parts I also had that inclued a couple plungers robbed from some 283 balers
 

Hayguy

Well-known member
from a guy who sells 15 to 20 thousand bales into the horse market each year, we need $6 plus for the added expense over round bales getting it put up, however gotta love those horse people. my cow's are here to clean up the hay that doesn't make the grade for them.
 

Soapweed

Well-known member
Nice pictures, Leanin' H. Your livestock look well-fed and content. It's always interesting to see the terrain and conditions where others are ranching.
 
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