Branding Day

Saturday morning was sunny and warm, and only slightly windy.  It was a good day for working outside. Specifically, it was a good day for branding.

Branding is the most widely used method of permanently identifying animal ownership. Other methods can include ear tags (which we also use) and RFID chip implants.  Branding itself can be done hot or cold.  We use a hot brand.  It is electric, so no need for a branding fire.

Many ranch operations choose to brand all their calves, each year.  From what I understand, it may be more important to brand more animals if the cattle are at pasture near many other similar-looking breeds, or if they graze on an open range, or if there are problems in the area with cattle rustling (yes, it still happens!) Around here, we only brand the heifers that we are going to keep as part of the herd. Our animals do not graze on open range, and are not too terribly close to others' herds, few of which are simmental or simangus anway.  Our calves are not branded because most of them will be sold in the fall anyway.  So, out of practicality, and I think for the sake of making less of a somewhat unpleasant necessity, only the heifers are branded.

Each year at calving time, each calf born receives a tag with the same number on it as its mother.  At branding time, the replacement heifers get a new "name" and the tags are switched out-- as easy as changing an earring. Painless.  Before the actual branding process began, Jeff and I worked on writing out ear tags for each of the animals.  We would be keeping 21 heifers; each receiving a new tag.  The front of the tag features our brand, J3, (pronounced: J Three Bar), and the number of the animal. There is a system behind the numbers and letters, but I'm not sure I understand it completely, so that will be another post for another time.  The back of the tag features three letters, S, D, and B.  S is for Sire, ie which bull sired this animal. D is for Dam, or the mother of the animal.  B is for the Birth Year of the animal.  All the animals we branded were one year old, born in 2011.


 All the heifers were brought into the corrals and one by one through the squeeze chute.  They each got a vaccine, their new ear tag, and our brand.  Carol helped herd the animals into the chute. Tom operated the chute itself and administered vaccines, and changed ear tags.  Jeff applied the branding iron and helped Tom.  I was the secretary, preparing the tagger and also taking notes of the cows' new numbers. The whole operation went very smoothly.

You should be able to see our J3 brand on the right rib of this cow.

The biggest difference of this branding  was actually the fact that we only used one brand, just the J3.  Tom and Carol have used a different brand, LES, on their herd over the years. This year all the replacement heifers were needed in our herd, as our cattle are older and many will need to be sold as soon as this fall.  These heifers were a combination of animals from our own herd, though most were from Tom and Carol's herd. They have a great set of cows, so these calves will provide a great boost to our cow herd, and we were very appreciative that they were willing to allow us to add the heifers to our cows!