Spring Cow Feeding

Hello to my (tiny) blogosphere of readers! (Thanks mom!)

I have been MIA for over a week and I missed last week's Thankful Thursday.

Here's Why.

Stressful caseload at school + busy track season + busy farm season/homelife = not enough sleep + little time for myself = SICK KATIE!

Yep. I spent the good portion of the weekend without moving from my bed. It started with a sore throat last Wednesday. Thursday I spent the entire, long day, which also happened to be cold and damp, outside for a track meet-- throat got worse and add to that neck and head aches. Friday I woke up with a fever in addition to the other symptoms and subsequently spent more time in bed sleeping than I did awake. My throat hurt SO BAD. I felt pretty awful the rest of the weekend, but thankfully felt OK enough to go to school starting this week. Today, Tuesday, I feel pretty much back to fine. I'd say I'm at 95% of 100.

Needless to say, blogging was a nonessential activity while I was trying to get back to feeling semi normal. I don't know if it was some version of Strep or the flu or what, but I was pretty miserable for a few days there. Thankfully, I never got a runny nose or cough--you know, the really annoying cold and flu symptoms. Just had the painful ones. My lymph nodes were so swollen I thought they would burst if I touched them wrong. Ugh. I managed to somewhat dull the pain and the fever by simply taking Advil the whole time I was sick. Better than nothing!

The whole weekend felt like a weekend that had been full of plans but ultimately, some things got pushed by the wayside.

What I DID do over the weekend:

• Jeff did convince me I was feeling OK enough to join some friends of ours for a lovely dinner on Friday night. Surf and Turf with beef from their ranch and shrimp from Pike's Market in Seattle. So good! Great conversation and company, too. 
• Jeff and I also attended North Star's Graduation Commencement ceremony on Saturday afternoon. We arrived right before it began and left immediately after it was done. I felt bad about not going through and shaking hands with the grads and visiting with friends, neighbors, and coworkers, but I was just feeling so awful. Still, glad we went. The speaker was a man named Flint Rasmussen, who is actually a Rodeo Clown by profession. He tours with the Professional Bull Rider circuit. He was a really great speaker and had some good advice for the kids. 
• Sunday, I felt good enough to get outside a bit and help Jeff with some cow chores. Photos will follow later in this post!

What I did NOT do over the weekend:

• Household chores and cooking. OK, I did laundry on Sunday but that's really about it. Special kudos to Jeff for taking my turns with pet chores and other household drudgery.
• I didn't do any blogging or spend much time at all on the computer. Mostly, I was asleep. Priorities.
• I didn't do the 10K trail race in Ulm, MT that I've been sort of planning on for a long time. (If I couldn't even get up to walk from my bed to the kitchen table, how could I have run 6.2 miles, hmm?) Honestly, as the weekend approached, even before I got sick, I was leaning toward not going anyway. Ulm is nearly 3 hours from my house and since I'm gone so much in the spring anyway, it was starting to look like a good idea to stay home. Turned out to be cold and rainy on Sunday morning in Ulm anyway. Hopefully next year. 

So, lets get back to the pictures and info of what I did do on Sunday, which was help Jeff feed cows.

Jeff, Tom and some neighbors spent last Thursday (while I was at the track meet) sorting our cows and calves into breeding groups, administering vaccines to the calves, and hauling the groups of pairs to pasture. We have four breeding groups and we breed the "old fashioned way," meaning that we don't use artificial insemination to breed our cows. Here's a post I did a few years ago, specifically about how we breed our animals: http://prairieponderingsmt.blogspot.com/2014/02/matchmaker-matchmaker.html. The post is worth a look especially for the YouTube video at the end. Anyway, this is the time of year when the magic happens.

These gentlemen are about to be let out into the world to do work.

Get ready, ladies!

Our cows and calves are already out at pasture and the men will join them tomorrow or Thursday. It's going to be quite a bit like the Discovery Channel around here. This time of year, the cows get a little extra feed supplement in addition to the grass they eat at pasture. It's called range cake, or just cake. We drive out to their pastures and dump little piles of it on the ground for them to eat. It just helps with their overall nutrition as they are rebounding from calving and supporting a growing calf, and spring grasses are still a bit short. Here is a post I did back in February that has a lot more information about range cake: http://prairieponderingsmt.blogspot.com/2015/02/cake-walk.html. If you want to learn more, I highly suggest you click back and read through that one!

I went with Jeff on Sunday to feed the range cake. When we drive into the pasture and get close to the group of animals, Jeff will roll down the window and hit his hand on the outside of the pickup door and yell, while honking the horn. The cows know that this is the dinner bell and typically come running. It always makes me giggle to see them run this time of year because their udders are still so big! They get pretty excited about their range cake, though!

The cows know that the cake comes from inside that bag and they are pretty eager. Some of them will eat it out of your hand if you hold still enough. I love that our cows are so gentle.

 We pour the pellets out into little piles in the grass and the cows munch away. You can really see in this picture how the cows have lost their winter coats and are down to their short, summer hair. The light wasn't great on Sunday, but their coats are actually really gossy and nice-looking right now. Overall, the cows and calves look to be in really good condition. The calves especially are bouncy and happy.

Jeff snapped this photo of me dumping out some cake for the girls. I like cow chores where I can be in among the herd. While you do have to be aware of the cows--where they are and what they are doing--overall, they're used to people and are really pretty gentle. It was nice to be outside.

The astute reader will have noted that I made mention to rainfall and was wearing my rain coat and boots in the photo. Yes, it did (finally!) rain a bit over the weekend! We ended up with between .5 and .6 of an inch of rain, with about .7 on our farmland to the north. There were PUDDLES in the yard! I had nearly forgotten what such a thing even was! The rain was a good drink for the crops and the pastures, but we'll certainly need more before too long, since we were so dry to begin with.

So that's what's been going on around here! What did you do (or NOT do) over the weekend?

Cake Walk

We've all heard the expression, "Let them eat cake!" In the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette uttered that phrase, which exemplified how out of touch the royal court was with the realities of starvation in the largely peasant society they ruled over. If they can't eat bread, they can surely still eat cake, right?  "Let them eat cake" is an expression we use on our ranch, too, sort of tongue in cheek.  I assure you it's not for the same reason! Our animals are far from starving. Although, in a sense, we are giving a certain group a little something different that the whole herd isn't getting...

We are really starting to get close to calving time here, and with that, we are feeding bales of hay and straw to the herd daily. By now, the young cows and heifers have been split from the main herd. This would be any animal who will be having either her first or second calf. These are the soon-to-be mamas that are more likely to need a little extra help calving or might be more likely to encounter difficulties, so by separating them out, it becomes easier for whoever is walking through the herd to identify them. To this group, we like to feed a little extra in addition to the hay bales they munch on.

Enter the range cake.

Range cake is a nutrient-dense feed comprised of mostly mulched up grasses and molasses to hold it together. It's aa all-natural, highly fortified protein, vitamin and mineral supplement, shaped like large pellets. Our young cows get a range cake supplement to their diet of hay once a day, in the morning. Yesterday, I had the honors of feeding the range cake to the girls!

They really go crazy for this stuff. I had walked over to say hello to the girls and snap some photos on my phone. Meanwhile, Jeff was getting a few things ready in the barn. I had a few minutes with the young cows and heifers, and they were pretty curious about me! They were all looking at me, and several came over to the fence for a curious sniff. I'm sure they were thinking, "Stop looking at us and give us our range cake!"  But we had fun anyway! I just love spending time with the cows.

Take a look at the ear tags. The A cows are having their first calf this year, while the Z cows will be second-time mamas.

Cattle are very curious animals! The blonde cow on the left got very close to me, as you'll see in the next image...

I think she would have licked my phone if I didn't step slightly away...

Harvey likes visiting the cows, too! Especially when there's a fence in between him and the animals. He really likes to lick their noses, and they don't seem to mind, either! He'll come right up to them, stick his head through the rungs, and give them a lick!

Z-35 is one of my very favorite cows. She is so pretty, and very gentle. Always one of the first cows to say hello to me!
She and Harvey get along pretty well, too, as you can see.

All told, I'd say 7 or 8 cows came to the fence just for Harvey! Gotta love animals! :)

As soon as the girls heard the sound of Jeff pouring cake into the buckets, Harvey and I became old news. They immediately clambered over toward the small gate where Jeff normally enters the pen, as if they'd be able to sneak a few pellets here and there!

I would be the one to feed the pellets today. I had done it before, but quickly ran through my mind the order in which I would do things, where I'd walk, how I'd pour the cake, and so on. When dealing with large, hungry animals, even animals as gentle as these, it's best to have a plan. Then, I grabbed the first bucket and tucked myself into the pen. The girls were really crowding me for space, excited as they were for their morning snack!  I flailed my free arm toward them and gave them a few shouts of "Ha! Ha!" and they flitted away a bit. I walked over to the farther away feeder and poured the first bucket of cake into it, so that it would be evenly spread out-- to lessen "fighting" among the girls. Plus, by feeding into the farther away feeder first, I would have much more space to freely walk back for the second bucket and feed it, which I did with no problems.

By this time, Jeff was ready for me to walk back to the larger gate and let him in with the tractor so we could feed a bale. And on we went with the rest of our rounds of feeding for the day. Feeding the range pellets to the young cows was as smooth as ever. A real cake walk! So, you see here that, like in the times of the French Revolution, cake is a treat. The difference is that we keep all of our animals fed and happy at all times. And, unlike Marie Antoinette, I love walking among the fray, being with them, and making it possible to let them eat cake! I don't think I'll be guillotined by this bunch. :)

Bullpen: Answer Key

A few days ago I posted this photo and asked you all to find a few key items in it, sort of like a game: 

Here were the items to find:
Can You Find It?
1-3: Three bull tails
4.  Twine in the hand
5. A Diamond
6. A red hoodie
7. A yard light
8. Two windows

And below is the "answer key."  I'll admit I don't have the answer items numbered exactly the same as they are in the list, and some of the numbers are hard to see, too.My bad. Keep in mind this is the first time I've tried "Find It on the Farm," and there's room for improvement.

The item that had the most people stumped was the diamond. If you look very carefully, there is a diamond on Jeff's boot. Mystery solved!

Please let me know what you think of this new series. My plan is to go for once a month for this game and see how it goes. Which items were hard to find? What would make this a better activity? Leave comments below. Thanks, and glad you played!

Find It On The Farm! Volume 1: Bullpen

I'm starting a new series on the blog called Find It on the Farm. Today is your lucky day- you've stumbled upon Volume 1: Bullpen.

This new series, Find It on the Farm, is essentially a monthly I Spy game. I'll post a picture and a list of things for you to find in the photo. Then, the next day or maybe two days later, I'll post the answers-- which is going to be the same photo with the objects pointed out in them. I'm sure you've all played games like this before. I thought it would be a fun way to get some reader involvement and keep people coming back, plus you get an in-detail look once a month at what is going on at Bangs farms. Who knows, you might learn something!

This inaugural photo for Find It on the Farm was taken a few days ago by yours truly when Jeff and I were feeding cows. In case you missed that post (which I stupidly posted during the Superbowl, as if people were just trolling facebook and the blogosphere), you can read it HERE.  For now, enjoy the first photo in Find It on the Farm, entitled Bullpen. The list of things to find is right below the photo. Have fun!

Can You Find It?
1-3: Three bull tails
4.  Twine in the hand
5. A Diamond
6. A red hoodie
7. A yard light
8. Two windows

Answer post will be up within a few days!

Livestock Resource Management

Have you ever wondered what farmers and ranchers do in the winter?

Winter may not be as hectic and labor intensive as other seasons, but it is a time of office work. This is when we make big decisions about what to plant for the upcoming year and also when we budget and allocate expenses. In large business corporations, the Accounting Department helps crunch the numbers so the higher-ups can make informed decisions. On a farm the size of ours, we are our own Accounting Department and CFO rolled into one.

This time of year we are also something I like to think of as Livestock Resource Managers. That's a fancy way of saying...We Keep Our Cows Fed and Happy. We (ranchers) are managing the resources (hay and straw) of the livestock (cows). Normally, our herd grazes in pasture or stubble fields, but in the winter, they can't do that. They still gotta eat, so that means daily feeding chores.  Yesterday I had the chance to help Jeff with Livestock Resource Management on a beautiful, sunny, 8-degree morning.  I love being among the animals.  Harvey and Abby "helped" too. Here's a few photos...

Single digits and snow attracts large flocks of grouse. Can you see them roosting in the trees?
This is the sight that greeted us when we pulled into the yard yesterday. 

Abby, sitting pretty in the snow.

When it's this cold, Harvey wears his hoodie. He still looks handsome.

Jeff, driving tractor, unrolls the second hay bale for the cows.

My favorite photo of the day. Cows munching away, beautiful light, Sweetgrass Hills in the background. Love it. 

I think Abby and Harvey "help" only so they can have first chance to wrestle in freshly pitched straw!
They go nuts in this stuff!

Feeding the bulls. 

These are the heifers and 2nd-calvers.
They are already split from the herd in preparation for calving.