Until the Cows Come Home.....They're Home!!

What is that funny little saying? "Until the cows come home." I always wondered what that meant so I Googled it.
It means a long time, usually defining how late
someone might stay up at night or out partying.
The origin of the phrase goes back to
a time when people were familiar with the time cows came home
(in the very early morning... 4 - 5 a.m.) because they wanted to be milked. That would be milk cows. Our cows are beef cows and being that beef cows are cooler than milk cows they come home the cool way. Last week about 9 days after the calves came home the cows caught a ride on a semi in a cow wagon and arrived home in the early afternoon.

Roger backing up to the unloading chute.



Coming down the chute. The girls are glad to be home.


Catching up with the rest of the herd.


They will graze in this pasture near the river until the feed runs out. Then we will move them to a field where they will be fed hay. Idaho has happy cows too!

Weaning The Calves

On November 11th we weaned the calves from the cows. The first is a picture of herding the cattle into the corrals at the ranch before sorting the calves away from their mothers and loading them onto the trucks. This is the only picture I took that day because it was a weird foggy and cold day. The cabin was a nicer place to be.


Here are the calves home in the cleaned out corrals bedded with fresh straw. They mooed for their mommies for about three nights and days after they were weaned. It's quite a noise to listen to!


The calves have been sorted into different pens by size and sex. The above calves are heifers. The best of these heifers will replace some of the older cows in the herd next year.


This is Roger at feeding time. He loads bales of hay into the hay feeder, cuts and pulls out the baling twine and drives the feeder around the corrals with the tractor. The feeder is chopping the hay bale then depositing the hay into the mangers next to the corrals where the cattle can eat it. The calves are fed twice a day.




This is a pen of steers. They will eventually be sold to feedlots where they will be fattened up for beef.


But for now they are very content, well taken care of calves.

Scattering Sunshine

OK, I know most of you think of farming and ranching as a glamorous lifestyle where we drive around in John Deere tractors and Ford pickups looking good or ride our horses off into the sunset. I'm going to shatter that illusion in this post. There are quite a few stinky jobs that have to be done on the farm and this is one of them......hauling manure! After last year's calves were weaned in the fall, they spent most of the winter in the corrals behind Grandmas. After a winter of feeding the calves and strawing the pens when they got a little "gooey" the pens get pretty thick with manure. The calves were sold in the spring and the manure was left to compost over the summer. Now that it is time for this year's calves to come home from the ranch, the corrals need to be cleaned out. This job fell to Alan this year.

As you can see it is pretty deep. About three foot deep on the level.

He put the bucket attachment on the telehandler and started scooping

and scooping.

It takes about eight scoops to fill the manure spreader.

He then drove to the field behind our house and drove up and down while the manure spreader flung the manure over the field.

Cheap fertilizer!

The manure in our corrals covered about 90 acres. It took about a week to complete this task. There's a lot of driving between the corrals and fields. A spreader full only covers about a land and a half. It's a crappy job but somebody has got to do it.

Grain Harvest 2008

The men starting cutting the grain on Saturday, August 16th. Because of the late start planting this year and the cooler weather there were some fields that were still green. They started on the ones that were the ripest and then moved on to the others as they ripened. Harvest went pretty well. It did rain one day about half way through harvest. The weather wasn't warm enough to dry the grain for a few days after it rained and it set them back about five days. The moisture content of the grain needs to be so low before it can be stored. They finished with the last of the grain on Friday, September 12th and they started cutting third crop hay the next day.

This field is Cherry 4 (yes the fields have names)

Unloading into the old Peterbilt.

Off for another round.

Unloading grain from truck into grain storage bin behind Grandma's.

Roger watching the auger unload the grain into bins.

Tanner watching Uncle Alan move the auger to grain bins behind our house.

Cattle Drive

I was thinking the other day that all I have blogged about lately is farm and ranch topics. But then again that is who we are and what we do. So on with the next ranch related item. Our cattle have been grazing in our own private pasture since they were hauled to the ranch in May. Every year during the first week of July we move them to pasture on the national forest. We always try to make it a fun day with family and friends or anyone with a horse or four wheeler who wants to come. The more the merrier. This year our regular cowboys were, Roger, Alan, Laura and Lynn Rushton. Our Honda cowboys were Rachel, my dad, Dale Armstrong and my nephew Sean Gilman. Also joining us were Chris and Heather Campbell and four of their children on horses and Heather's mother, Joy Hancock who took turns with Chris in the pickup with their baby. Other four wheeler cowboys were Mark Boam and his son, Cody who run a few cattle with us. In the pickup or "Chuck Wagon" were myself, Grandma, Sara and baby Kailynn. It was a beautiful day. It seemed like the cattle wanted to run this year. That's why all the dust in the pictures. (No, it wasn't a stampede) After we got them where we wanted them, we had a picnic in the shade until they were all mother upped (calves and moms find each other). It was a great day for a cattle drive.

Haying Time

Clark Farms just finished up the first hay cutting of the summer. Weather permitting, we usually do three cuttings a summer. We cut the hay just before it blooms. That's when the protein content is the highest. The higher the protein, the better. It makes the hay worth more. Dairy's want the higher protein and if you can get the hay put up without rain that's an added bonus. I think this is the first crop we've put up without being rained on for a couple of years. Alan started cuttting the hay across from Grandma Clark's on June 7th. It took a week to cut all our hay.

After they cut the hay they let it dry for four or five days then they rake two windrows into one larger windrow. It also turns the hay over so it can dry some more. But the trick is to rake it early in the morning when it's dewier so all the leaves don't fall off the stems. Cow's don't like just stems and all the nutrients are in the leaves. Raking has been Laura's job this year. She's been a little trooper getting up between 4 and 5 a.m. taking off in her tractor until 10 or 11 a.m. She's been alone in the dark in some fields far from the main road let alone anywhere near the house. But she has seen some awesome sunrises and a lot of wild life; a moose, a few deer and a den of coyote pups running and playing through the field and she loves watching the Osprey and Eagles flying around when she's working near the river. She also likes to listen to a good book on tape while working.

Then after the hay is dry but not too dry, Roger comes in and bales it. Again there's the tricky timing of not too wet or to dry. He usually starts about 11 at night and has been baling until 2 or 3 in the morning until it's too dewy. He comes in and sleeps a few hours then heads back out about 9 a.m to check water and when the dew comes off he will bale again until it's too dry. He bales it in the 3 by 4 by 8 foot size bales. We have had larger bales or round bales, but this size is easier to truck and still works well for us to feed our own cattle with.

It took Roger about a week to bale 1,500 bales which was a record time for us. The no rain issue helped there. The little wagon on the back of the baler is an accumulator. It holds three bales as they come out of the baler then he can dump them at the end of the field making it so they don't have to drive all over the field when loading them on the trucks.

Then they load them on the trucks. I thought it was strange when they started using the semi for hauling hay out of the fields. But it sure beats the old little wagons we used to use. They can move a lot of hay with it.

They also use this trailer behind the flatbed pickup. It holds a fair amount of hay itself.

Roger used this trailer last week to pull the red tractor up to the ranch to do some work. It's not very often we take the tractor to the ranch. But it's nice to be able to when needed.

They then unload the hay in one of the many stack yards where it sits until it is needed or sold. The machine Alan is using here is called the Telehandler. I guess because the arm can telescope longer and shorter as needed. I wasn't sure this was a necessary piece of equipment when Roger brought it home but it has become indispensable to our farming operation. They use it all the time from loading hay, hauling manure and pushing snow. Roger even used it to lift Uncle Les up high to fix his yard light a couple of weeks ago.



They finished baling and hauling the last field June 30th. It's a good job to have done. Only two more times to go this summer.

Oh, I had to add this picture of Tanner. We like to start training the help while they're young.

Weekend Getaway

Last week Roger and I went on a weekend getaway. He had a few days when they weren't irrigating any fields so we thought we'd take the long way to the cabin to check the cattle and spend the night. By the long way I mean we first went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is the total opposite way. It was a great day. The sun was shining, no wind and it was semi warm. The drive was beautiful though I didn't take any pictures on the way. After we left Jackson we went over the pass into Victor, then on to Driggs. Somewhere past Driggs we took a back way to Ashton. The farms were scenic, they rolled on forever. From Ashton we went through Island Park to Last Chance then we turned onto the Kilgore road that took us through Kilgore and on in to Spencer where we got on the highway to Humphrey then to the cabin. It was a great ride. Here are a few pictures from the Ranch.

Cabin Sweet Cabin

Look how high the creek behind the cabin is.

Happy cows with the snowy Lima Peaks in the background.

Two bulls fighting for the affections of a lady cow.

Handsome Rancher Roger overlooking his herd in the big field.

Branding Calves

We branded the last batch of calves today. There were 150 in this group. Roger and Alan branded two smaller batches that were in different pastures last week while I was in Washington. Today was a perfect day for branding. The weather was nice, about 60 with a light breeze. We almost cancelled after yesterday's rain and snow. We had some good help today with Laura, Derek Gohr, Rhett Miller and my Dad, Dale Armstrong. Also Tyler Gohr and even Rachel and I helped for a minute. You might notice Alan is missing from these pictures. He was welding on the branding chute the other day and kinked his back. He is walking kind of crooked and hunched over like Quasimodo. He did supervise the branding set up and helped chase the cattle into the corral in his pickup but had gone home to rest by time I took these pictures. We hope he is better soon.

Laura, Derek, Rhett, Dad

Sorting the cows from the calves.

Roger watching the gate so the calves don't get out.

Derek and Rhett keeping the calves pushed up and ready to load into branding chute.

Dad pushing calves into branding chute which straps calf to one wall that then folds out to a table so they can work on the calf; which includes marking, vaccinating, castrating with green cheerios and branding.

Roger branding a calf. It doesn't smell so good.

Tyler marking a calf's ear.

Calves waiting for their turn

Cows waiting for their calves.

I love it when the help is this happy!