Its getting hot

I’m reposting this original post because of course the website is broken and now I’m spending my time trying to fix it instead of doing actual work. Sigh.

I received a call from WRAL last week asking if they could come out and interview me about the heat and how our animals were doing. While I was willing to be on TV (I don’t like it, but Jeanette yells at me I don’t blog anymore so maybe being interviewed would be easier? Nah, never mind. TV people take forever to do anything.)

So decision made, I was able to pawn the opportunity off on another farmer friend who did an excellent job in her interview. But rats, now I have to blog about it or Jeanette will get me….

Despite my avoiding the limelight again, we actually were doing something about the heat for our cows. We have a small pasture at the back corner of our farm. It has a small barn. A small pond. A bit of grass. And a lot of woods. Back in the day (when I was a kid), it was connected to the main pasture through a narrow fenced section and was part of our grazing rotation. But now with our huge chip pile, downed fences, trees in the way, etc it is isolated from the rest of the grazing areas. We use it as a storage area, a shooting range, and various other small things.

I knew when we had such a cool spring that when summer arrived, it would come with a vengeance so I had Vicente start fixing the back pasture fencing so we could rotate the cows through there for a week or so. Our main pastures have the wooded areas fenced out whereas the back pasture is old school, it still has the woods as part of the pasture. Plus these woods had grown a lot over the years and had a lot of leaves down at cow level, something the cows love (I’ll show you that in a second).

Vicente spent about a week working on repairing or replacing fencing, cutting fallen limbs, stringing hot wire, putting a hot box in so we could energize the wire, and basically sleeping in a Calamine lotion bath each night for about a week. On the day of the move, he strung temporary fencing right down the driveway from our main pasture to the back pasture entrance, making a corral so the cows could walk down the paved driveway like each of you do when you leave the store. The entrance is right at the bottom of the chip pile, you may have noticed it has been smoothed over recently.

The cows were anxious to move to their next pasture for grazing, but they weren’t expecting a chance to walk through dad’s front yard, down a driveway, and into a new place. This is where keeping a few moms around pays off. The young cows, nervous that something is different don’t want to have anything to do with this move. #160, a flighty, jumpy cow on a good day, hopped the temporary wire and ran off almost immediately. I watched him go, grumbling about how he was getting on the trailer next.

The moms, who’ve literally lived here their entire lives, followed the corral we had made and moseyed along till they entered the new pasture. #160, realizing the was leading a revolt of one, jumped the fence again and reentered the herd to the new area. Even the two young calves followed along, shepherded by our old and experienced moms. All in all, it took a week to setup, an hour to put the temporary corral together, and 10 minutes to actually move the cows.

The cows LOVE being in new woods. I wish I could do it for them all the time. There are trees to scratch against, leaves to eat, adventures to get into. Often I’ll see them running around acting like kids on the last day of school. This time they were pretty chill. Mainly in this video you’ll see a small cedar crashing around as one of our moms (almost completely hidden) goes to town on it, scratching everything she can think of against it.

The cows made it about a week in the back pasture enjoying their time in the woods, with a pond to bath in, and enough grass to keep it interesting. But by Saturday, they were out of grass and couldn’t eat any more leaves. We ended up feeding a bale of hay to tide them over till the first of the week.

Monday was time to move them back and we washed, rinsed, repeated the process. The moms lead the way, knowing what they were doing. #160, being the %@#$# that he is, held back, got pissed, and ran back into the woods, taking the two young calves with him who were now wound up from his agitation. Vicente and I spent 15 minutes running around the woods trying to convince these two young calves (read: young and stupid) that they wanted to go where everyone else had gone. #160, after stirring up trouble, had gone along on his own to the new pasture, leaving us with the young calves who on a good day can’t walk through a gate. I was wondering just how we were going to get these calves out of the woods when I heard a familiar cow bellow. “Oh thank goodness!” I thought. One of the moms had realized Jr hadn’t shown up. She’d turned around, walked all the way back through the pasture, through the barn yard, down the drive way and to the gate. She called to her calf, in no uncertain terms, to “Hurry up and get up here!” With mom scolding him, both of the calves ran to mom who walked them back to where they were supposed to be, in the pasture with everyone else. I don’t think I’d want a herd of cattle without at least one experienced mom.

All in all, it was a lot of work for a little bit of grazing. But it gave the cows a chance to be out of the heat for a week, to graze somewhere different, and to clean up the underbrush in our back pasture.

Speaking of underbrush. I’ve had this conversation with several farmers and extension agents. People tend to want to mow, spray, chainsaw, etc when they have an area they want cleared. Growing up on a farm where the cattle spent time in the woods, and it was like a park in there, I’ve always cautioned against doing any mechanical or chemical work. Its been years since we had the cattle clean up anything but they certainly still know how. The area I’ve been discussing was about 6 acres of gnarly growth. A week with a handful of cattle, and you can walk through the worst areas and barely touch a leaf. Cleaning up the bigger stuff with a chainsaw would be quite a bit easier now, and the cows are a little fatter to boot. A win/win.

Here are some before and after shots to show what I’m talking about.

Of course, the trees didn’t disappears and the thing hasn’t been mowed down smooth, but if you wanted to get in there and cut out some trees now you could without a machete.

In the video you couldn’t even tell there was water back there. Now I can walk down to the water.

Now if my child labor hadn’t grown up, I could send them in to start clearing.