Category: Kirk Cattle
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Let’s Go For A Jeep Ride And Check Cows
School started on Monday which meant a change in everyone’s schedule at my house. My husband and I had our kids do the daily cow, salt, and stock tank checking over the summer so when they had to exchange their work duds for school duds, I took over their job. We run our cows on…
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Planning For An Uneventful Cow-Moving Venture
Earlier this week we took out some panels to set up around the feed bunk for our replacement heifers. It’s part of our plan to hopefully make moving them off of summer pasture less challenging or stressful. Last year we managed to get our previous heifer bunch loaded and moved but the process wasn’t a…
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In My Next Life I Want To Be A Cow
In my next life I want to be a cow on a United States cattle ranch so I can find out what it feels like to be spoiled. Cows live a cushy life as a result of a rancher’s hard work and his pocketbook. If I were a cow, I would get to eat an…
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Going Out To Pasture
Moving cows to summer range is my favorite day of the year. It’s better than Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. I don’t go to bed regretting eating too much like I do with the other holidays and moving cows onto Forest Service takes place in the summer not in the middle of winter….
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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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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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Binoculars: Our Buddy at Calving Time
Having binoculars is a handy way to check on a cow from a distance that’s calving but we never used to use binoculars much at calving time because we were too cheap to get a good pair. We had several cheapie ones but every time we tried to use them they just frustrated us. They…
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Baby Fix
I don’t miss changing truckloads of dirty diapers, feeling half comatose all the time, and smelling like a dairy barn everyday, but I do occasionally get baby pangs. Spring calving is my oddball way of getting my baby fix. Unlike my husband, I’ve always enjoyed the newborn stage when our kids were tiny and dependant…
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Labor Pains
Sometimes the labor involved to help a cow out that’s in trouble is nothing but a big pain. I can relate to the motherly instincts cows have, just not their impulse to calve alone and unassisted. If a cow’s a first-timer, having complications during calving, or the calf is in jeopardy, her unwillingness to cooperate…
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Producers and Their Cows
Part of the reason people don’t know much about cattle handling practices is because the cattlemen are busy spending time with their cows. Ranchers are committed to raising and caring for their stock to the best of their ability which means getting frequent updates on their herd. Numbered ear tags serve as an identification and…