Author: Amy
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The Ranch Wife Chronicles: A Fellow South Dakota Ranch Wife’s Blog
At the Women In Ag conference this past fall I met a new friend Robyn, who lives in the opposite direction from where I live, and since we met we’ve stayed in contact through technology. Robyn and her husband live on a ranch in a more remote location than I do, yet she and I…
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Branding 2011
The day of our branding was a déjà vu experience. It was a blustery Saturday with 40 mile an hour winds and bouts of snow spit-balling riders helping us as we rode out and faced the blasts of wind to gather our herd and push them toward the barn. It was definitely not a cowboy hat-wearing…
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What Happens To Kids Who Don’t Get TV Time
When you deprive a child of television, they’ll end up doing stuff like this with their time: This is an example of what my son can do with free time, camouflage duct tape and black electrical tape when there’s no television programming to watch. Evidently holding his water bottle in his hand isn’t as…
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Roast Beef: The Ultimate in Lazy Cooking
Roast beef is one of my favorite cuts of beef because it’s the easiest meat to cook and make meals out of. I usually have our meat processor make 4-5 pound roasts out of our butcher critter for us. I like that I can squeeze three meals out of one roast without much fuss to…
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Saving Bales and Then Some
The secret to the success of our marriage and our ranch among other kinds of work is baling wire. Between my husband and me, it takes a lot to hold a ranch together; mostly a lot of baling wire. We fix the majority of our problems with this ranch necessity. We have an old square…
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A Ranchwife’s Slant’s Core Value #5: Expand
Expand is a core value that is mostly a regular reminder of a continuous goal I have to grow in my column writing. It’s a core value that keeps me focused on improving and growing in different aspects of my column as well as my writing in general. The biggest goal is to expand my…
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Lookin’ At Life in Black and White
Since the majority of our calves look like these, we tend to get excited whenever we get some black baldy and brockle-faced calves. For those who are unfamiliar with such terminology, a baldy is a white-faced (or to us, mostly white-faced) calf and a brockle-faced calf has black and white markings on its…
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Everyday is Take-Your-Kids-to-Work Day for Ranch Kids
(Technically this should be posted on Thursday, since April 28th is “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day,” but since Tuesday is the day I post about all things family, I decided to stick with my schedule.) One of the things that my husband and I love about our two kids is their help….
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Core Value #4: Entertain
Entertain is the core value that I have the most fun with. Writing to entertain is the highlight of writing my column. Newspapers provide people with local, national, and world news; stock market reports, forecasts, classifieds, letters to the editor, and columnists. I seek to give readers something more entertaining than negative news or my…