Farm Work

Today I've gone riding, tied up the calves, dragged the arena, and helped fix the holiday trailer. Riding went well, My horse was fine, I just walked her around the arena a bit and jogged a little. I also tied up the calves and washed the heifers again. The heifer I'm showing has calmed down a lot and I think she will do fine in the show. The bulls still need a little bit more work.

Before I went riding I drug the arena. I hooked up the arena groomer to the quad and drug it around the arena. This gets rid of all the hoof prints and imperfections in the sand. Then we watered down the arena so that it wasn't so dusty.

In preparation for the show we had to get the holiday trailer ready. The slide-out wasn't working and we had to work with the batteries and charge them in order to get it to work. It finally did and now we just have a few more things we have to do to prepare it for the show. We will be camping up by the show ground during the show so we have to get it ready.

Other than that nothing much else is going on. I'll keep you posted.

-JT

Preg Check

Yesterday we washed the two bull calves we're taking to the summer show. They did well and it calmed them down a lot. Then we blew them off and clipped them so they looked nice and spiffy. Today we did the same thing with our heifer calves and now they're all nice and clean and ready for the show. When we clip the calves we take a pair of clippers and  basically try to make them look longer, wider, and more square. I mostly had to clip their shoulders, back, underbelly and tail. We usually do something called "rat-tailing" this is when you shave the middle of the tail down a lot so the calf looks wider.

Also today we preg-checked our cows. This is when we take an ultrasound machine and check to see if the cow is pregnant. It went fairly well except for one cow got caught in the chute by the hips and we had to push her back out the side. She didn't enjoy that very much. 

We have a water trough out in our field that supplies water to our cows, the other day we noticed that it wasn't full. The water trough depends on our dugout as a water source. It turns out the pump had drained the water on top and was now sitting on the shore of the dugout. It wouldn't reach it anymore so we had to go and get some more pipe so it would go out farther. Now everythings alright.

It's been a very productive couple of days and everything else is going alright.



-JT

Work

Now that school is over it is summer time and I can relax..... sort of. There's still alot of work to do during the summer. Today I'm going to change the battery on our fencer. The battery is electrifying our fence by the road. The reason for electrifying a fence is so that our livestock doesn't get onto the road. The battery is dead and so I have to go get a fully charged one and replace it so our cows don't get onto the road. There are many of other jobs to do on the farm during this time of year, since it is not cold out we can get alot more done. We have to clean out the barn, mow the grass, water the plants, organize all our equipment. Basically just making sure the whole farm is in order.

We have been working with the animals we are going to take to our Summer cattle show. We have been getting them in the barn and working on growing their hair by dumping water on them and putting the fan on them. We've also been walking our heifers which are still tame from our 4-H year. Mine follows me without hesitating and I think she'll do well in the show ring too. Soon we will be getting a pen system that has fans, sprayers and everything built-in so that will make our operation easier for spraying our calves.

The summer has been going good so far and I am looking forward to our cattle show, it should be a good time.

-JT