DATE NIGHT ON THE RANCH

20121125-203834.jpgIf you’re thinking my date night on the ranch includes lighting from antique lanterns, a nice bottle of wine and a roll in the hay… well you’ve seen too many episodes of Green Acres. No MY date night is all about feeding cattle. All 500 of them.  It takes about an hour but it’s an hour where Darrin and I are alone together. Just the two of us. I’ll take it! So just how do you feed 500 cattle in a feedlot? It starts with a 1980′s era garbage truck that’s been converted into a huge feed truck. First, Darrin loads the mixing box filled with gigantic augers with alfalfa hay that he grew all summer long. Then he adds molasses. No shit! Molasses! Next up?  Fruit Loops, Corn Flakes and any other grain cereal you can think of! I kid you not! Reno happens to be home to a 20121125-203851.jpgRalston Purina cereal plant and if one little thing happens on the product line, the whole line gets shut down and all that product is recalled. So Darrin hauls a20121125-203909.jpg huge trailer down there once a week and loads up the recalled cereal and brings it home as cow feed. Darrin loads all the food by driving the loader up a ramp that gets him high enough to be able to dump his load into the trailer. Augers, the size of tree trunks, slowly turn and mix all the food together. We are now into our “date” about 45 minutes. So we now hop into the cab and start driving around all the corrals. But get this! Darrin says this load he made weighs nearly 7500 pounds. 7500 POUNDS OF FOOD FOR 500 COWS! That’s a lot of cow feed. And remember he feeds twice, sometimes three times, a day. THAT’S REALLY 20121125-203937.jpg

A LOT OF COW FEED!

 

The food goes into feed bunks that are just wooden troughs, with wood panels on the outside and heavy cables on the inside. The cows reach their heads through the cables to the feed inside the troughs.

20121125-203925.jpgDarrin drives up and down the 20121125-203950.jpgbunks spilling out the cow feed down the feed truck chute. Ok by NOW, our date is just over an hour and I’m starving, frozen and thirsty for a glass of wine. Seriously?? When was the last date that ended like that for you and you still ended up with the guy?? And what’s worse? I could relive this date the next morning and night and every day thereafter until I’m 85. As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, date nights on the ranch are few and far between. And yes, my San Francisco self, still longs for quiet, candlelit dinners at Bix. But to be honest, dates like these are pretty cool too.20121125-204013.jpg

 

20121125-204027.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PREG CHECKING

Once again this post is not for everyone. But I kinda think you like it when I start a post that way. That’s because you all are my kind of people. And we like to talk about real life stuff. And often times that “stuff” is gross… and this post definitely falls into that category, even for me. Now that we have the warning out of the way, let’s get to it. On the ranch, we’ve been preg checking cattle.  That’s right we manually have to check to see if the cows/heifers are pregnant. And it aint pretty people! But let’s begin this story back in June when the cows and heifers are put in the pasture for 90 days with this guy. Well, this guy and about 25 of his friends. 20121111-095459.jpgThe bulls have 3 months to impregnate 500 head of cattle. Tough job but someone has to do it. The cows then live happily eating and sleeping, like every pregnant woman wishes she could do. But how do you know if they are actually bred?  That brings us back to the title of this post.  We preg check them. And here’s how. One at a time, we bring all 500 of them into the squeeze chute.20121111-095415.jpg It’s the name of the machine that holds them in place so they can’t move. Pretty much the same as the “stirrups” for all us woman in the OBGYN office. Steve, Darrin’s brother, is a large animal veterinarian. So on days like this, he’s in charge. And he’s teaching Eva and Domi the ropes.20121111-095326.jpg They wear full arm length gloves and then slowly inset their hands into the cows’ rectum. YYYYYEEEEEOUCHHHHH!!! Once their entire arm is inside the animal, they feel through the rectal wall down on top of the uterus. In the earliest stages of pregnancy, they’re feeling for membrane fluid. By 30 days pregnant, the calf is the size of a pea.   At 2 months it’s the size of a mouse. And at 3 months, the size of a rat. Between 3-7 months, it’s actually harder to feel the calf because the pelvis wall gets in the way. During that time frame, they will feel for arteries. Each check last less than a minute.   Ok, now all us moms have been “preg checked” before… but it was done in a sterile doctor’s office with a slender probe… AND IT STILL SUCKED!  But we have nothing to complain about when compared to a cow.

20121111-095334.jpgSo once their exam is over, the bred cows (the ones who have had a baby) are turned back out to pasture. The bred heifers (the ones who haven’t had a baby and need to be watched while delivering) will stay at the home ranch.  The “open” cows that didn’t get bred will be put into the Fall herd for one more chance.  They will be marked with a white ear tag so Darrin knows they didn’t get pregnant the first go around.   If they don’t get pregnant in the Fall they will be sold.  Total gestation period is 9 1/2 months. So come Spring, we’ll start “calving out.” Stay tuned! I’ll bring you up close and personal with the delivery of a calf. And I’ll probably begin that story with… “This post is not for everyone!!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BRANDING

Most people sleep in on Sundays don’t they? I honestly wounld’t know since I married a rancher.  Sunday is just another work day.  And this Sunday, after being up all night with a little boy who just broke his arm, we all headed up bright and early to the branding in Graegle, California where Darrin calved out his fall pairs.  Did that last sentence make sense to you? 15 years ago it wouldn’t have made sense to me either! “Calving out” refers to the cows (already had a baby) and heifers (never had a baby) giving birth. Think of it this way… I was a heifer when I had Eva and then I was cow when I had Dominic.  These calves were born from July of this year until about 3 weeks ago (that’s the “fall pairs” I referred to).

darrin ropes

Darrin roping

Cowboys roping

Cowboys roping

And in this day and age when I can type on a wirless keyboard, post to the internet from my couch and see who’s calling me just by looking at my TV… yes, branding is still necessary in the ranching world. It seems like it should be more hi tech to me too, but it’s not. Brands are the only sure way to tell which animal belongs to which rancher. And while fences separate pastures, cows have a huge knack for getting through those fences… not to mention the people who leave gates open.  Darrin winters some of his cattle in the desert near Fallon (about 1 hour east of Reno).   So half of his herd is released onto tens of thousands of acres in the middle of Nevada. Yes, you still need brands in 2012.  So here we are in Graegle branding 500 head of calves (this is the second weekend in a row we’ve branded).  The Damonte brand is an L-D.  It evastands for Louie Damonte.  That’s my father-in-law.  The guy who has worked his ass off his whole life to grow this operation.  After the calves are gathered from the pasture, the branding starts with cowboys roping the calves.  It’s like a chaotic team roping event at a rodeo.  One guy tries to get his rope around the calves’ head.  The second guy tries to rope the calves’ feet.  Once that happens, another cowboy pulls the calf down onto it’s side.  The ear is marked specific to the Damonte herd, vaccines are given,  rubber bands are put around the “nuts” of the boy calves (called steers) and finally, our hot iron is branded into the right hip of the animal.  Eva is learning the family business and doing a helluva job.  Domi is usually out there, but Mom said, “ABSOLUTELY NOT UNTIL HIS ARM HEALS!!!” 

domi

He’s still mad at me.  Once all the calves are branded, the cowboys push them back into the pasture or God’s Country as we call it.  They’ll stay in the pasture until the snow is so thick on the ground the cows can’t dig down to the natural grass.  At that point, Darrin will truck them to warmer pastures in Paradise, California (near Chico) or out to the desert I mentioned before.  Oh yes, my husband is also a trucker.  More on that in a future post.  So as you can see, a day in the life of a rancher is a week in the life of most men.

God's Country

God’s Country, Graegle, CA

WEIGH DAY

Living on a ranch is like herding cats EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE! There’s constant movement. Something is always broken. And the cows needDarrin pushes the cattle into corral tending to several times a day. And today, they needed to be weighed. You think getting weights would be easy. It is for us. We simply step on a scale, wait for the magic number to appear, curse at the number and step off muttering “damn scale is still broken.”. Well with cows, everything is about averages. First, you have to round them up. Darrin makes the funniest noises when he does this. Kind of like a “ssshhhh” you might say to the kids in a movie theater, only with a quick “sssstttt” at the end. Once they are corraled, you hope and prCrowded  Cowsay they don’t get mad at having their face shoved up the ass of another and start trying to break the fences down. Hey, these fences have been here for a hundred years! I’m never convinced they’re going to stand up to 2,000 pounds of angry cows pushing against them. And then you separate about 10 cows onto a huge scale where they are supposed to stand quietly and not move. Well since that’s never going to happen, Darrin waits for an average weight and jots it down. He weighs the cattle because he sold them at a certain weight. Well that might have been a week ago. And since cows eat constantly, they’re constantly putting on weight. So on shipping day, Darrin will either charge the buyer more money for the added weight the cows have gained or he’ll not ship as many cows. Plus, trucks hWeighing the Cowsave a weight limit and can only haul so many cows before they are overweight. So he has to be able to tell the buyer how many trucks to bring to the ranch. In this industry, the weather and weights make or break you. But you know what makes or breaks me? Knowing there’s something cool going on at the ranch that I can take pictures of to show all of you AND having my Sorrels in the car with me so I can take those pictures and not ruin my heels! meI swear my life is schizophrenic. On this one single day, I’m stomping around cow shit, breathing in tiny manure particles and 2 hours later, I’m interviewing Ann Romney. Oh if she only knew where I had just been!