Beeves

The beeves are just about finished. We took our first steer (beef) into the locker for processing and got it back last week. We sold 1/4 and kept 3/4. Our freezers are officially full. Its nice to look in the freezer going into the winter and see one filled with chicken, one filled with beef and one filled with pork and venison. I think we have our protein covered for this winter! We will be taking the next two beeves into the locker in two weeks. These should be excellent quality. They've been slowly eating the corn over the last few months. It definitely takes longer to grow a steer without inoculates and antibiotics but we really appreciate knowing that the meat is both high a quality and without medications and hormones. Tomorrow I'll move the corral from out of the pasture and into the paddock so that the steers can get used to being in the corral. That way when it's time to go I can close the door on the corral and load them up.

I moved the cows and the bull out to part of the outside of the pasture. There is still a lot of green grass under the standing blue stem. Normally I leave the outside of the pasture to blue stem, but I'd like to see how putting the cattle on in the fall causes the grasses to react. This will be the first time that I've tried this. Only part of the outside is being opened to them, about 1/4 of the outside, so the control will be the remainder. I noticed that the cow's utters are really full. I'm sure that it's uncomfortable to be that full, and they do seem agitated by the lack of their calves and I'm sure being full of milk. They haven't been making too much noise since we moved them from their calves, but then its been raining and blowing so much since we made the change that it would take a lot of noise to get above the roar of the weather.

Fall Cattle Work

Yesterday we separated all of the cows from the calves, vaccinated and castrated a couple of calves that didn't get banded. The vet earned his money having to assist in moving the cattle into and out of the shoot. We also ear tagged a few of the calves and one cow that didn't get tagged last year. It is very physical work and requires getting into the corral with the cows and encouraging them to get into the shoot. I moved the calves into the trailer and moved them over to Phil's place for weaning. Once weaned we'll bring them back, although I'm on the fence about holding back any heifers this year. It would be a lot easier to sell all of the heifers and to keep the bull for one more year, than to sell a bull this time of year. I guess I'll have to keep thinking this over to come up with a decision.

Chores

Anybody who thinks that its nice to have the house to themselves for a week doesn't hasn't tried to do chores on this farm by themselves! With Sharon and the kids visiting friends and relatives back east, I'm here doing chores over the next week by myself. When we're all on the farm, the chores are divided up and everyone has at least one chore to do in the morning and again in the evening or just after sunset. My normal chores are the cattle, feeding the cows, calves and fat steers. Doing one or two chores can be done fairly quickly when you have everything you need and go strait at it and have your rhythm. When it comes to doing all of the chores it takes a long time. Some of the time is spent going between chores. Some of the time is spent transitioning between the different tools for the different chores. You don't think much about having to get the egg basket when you're just get eggs, or having the water can to fill the chickens water if you have to get eggs and give water, but when you move between chores you have to gather the tools for one chore and drop off tools for the others just completed. Just moving between bottle feeding a calf where you have to mix the milk replacer in the house and put that in a the bottle to feed them and then you have to move to do chicken chores which means getting a basket, water etc and dropping off the bottle and go to another part of the farm feed, water and collect eggs, and then back to the back of the farm to the cows with the skid loader to move a round bale out to the pasture and back and forth it goes. The other thing that takes time is the inefficiency of doing something you don't do regularly. So today when I had set the egg basket on an egg box where the chickens lay their eggs, and I closed the lid and knocked half of the eggs out of the basket, that wasn't only a learning experience but a costly one! Once I was finished with chores this morning I had eggs just to make myself feel better. How many more days until everyone is home, I really miss them already?

I took a steer to the locker to be processed the other day. The steer had cut his face and rather than risk an infection I just took him to the locker a little early. He weighed about 1100lbs on the hoof when I took him in, so he was a little light. I think we'll keep this one and possibly sell 1/4 or 1/8th off of it. I took him to a locker down in Sibley, IA called Jakes. They look like they really know what they're doing and the butcher has great customer service. We still have to run the numbers to see what the inputs were so that we can set a price on the beeves pre-processing. We still have 2 more that need to go in, but they're scheduled for about the first or 2nd week of November. I setup the corral to run the steers into to sort the one out that I took to the locker, and left the corral in place to feed the other 2 in so that they get comfortable with the corral. Next time I shouldn't have to worry so much about pushing them through. Hopefully they'll just walk right in and onto the trailer. Today I'll work with George and Sara to move the corral out to the pasture. I'd like to wean all of the calves this week and run them through the corral to tag, castrate, worm and vaccinate the heifers. We'll have to see how the weather holds. We got some snow this weekend and they're calling for snow tonight and tomorrow and rain/snow for the rest of the week. It would be nice to work the cattle in warm weather, but sometimes the timing just doesn't work.