tlakota said:
good pictures...first calves will be hitting the ground here pretty soon?
Due date is February 23. Quite a bunch of them were synchronized and AI'ed by a neighbor, at his place where they spent the winter last year. They are bred to one of his bulls that has worked well on heifers in years past.
sic 'em reds said:
How does the portable calving shed work? Is it on sleds?
Good to see the dogs checking in on how things work.
You know.... "good" dogs are a pretty handy asset to have around.
The shed is built on pipe runners. It "could" be moved, though we probably won't. Right now it is pretty well frozen down to where it has been the last several years. Our welder son is just making some changes to make it more "user friendly." If we decide at some time to move it, it is made to just hook on and drag it to a new location.
The dogs are my son's dogs, although one of them is the sire to one of our dogs. He has two and we have two. They are all good dogs, because they stay well away from any cattle working activity that we do. :wink: They know that they darn well better.
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
Soapy, why don't you part with some of that moldly money and but a portable hydraulic chute? By the way the cattle look very nice.
Thank you, sir. The heifers aren't roly poly fat, but they look to me to be in about the right condition. They have been getting about twenty pounds of good hay and two pounds of 20% cake per day, plus free choice of salt, Vigortone mineral :wink: and good old Sandhills windmill water. They also have been running on large enough meadows to get just a little bit of grazing and plenty of excercise.
As to the hydraulic chute, we work cattle in three different locations. To be downright honest, I enjoy the peace and quiet of a manual chute.
It also doesn't take a mechanic to keep it going. Yesterday we only caught the first of each six. Peach Blossom just went down the line and vaccinated the other five in the runway. She, Saddletramp and I ran 300 head through in two hours and fifteen minutes. I doubt if we could have done it any faster had we been encumbered by a hydraulic chute.
