Ready and Waiting

My first calf felt warm soil this week.

This year, my cows will welcome their calves in a pasture on the south side of the county road, away from the barn and corrals where I might be able to help them in an emergency.

This particular pasture has a few coulees and shrubs along the creek, but other than that it offers little for protection from the wind.

The big advantage of this pasture is that it has grass. Most of the grass was laid down by heavy snowstorms in September and November, but some still stands.

So, just like a pregnant soon-to-be mother, I’ve been nesting lately.

The local tire shop helped.

Some ranchers build windbreaks from boards and sheets of metal. If they angle them just so and anchor them with rods and chains, the windbreaks might stay in place.

I hauled two loads of old combine and tractor tires out to the pasture.

I stacked them about 4 feet high in an arc.

Some of those combine tires weigh 3200 pounds.

Even itchy bovines won’t rub them off center.

The cows already appreciate those warm black tires. They huddled behind them during the last wind storm.

Then I started worrying about the risk of calving heifers without a way to capture a panicky new mother.

Sure, I could saddle up and bring her in, but chasing a heifer through a meandering creek with steep banks and over hillsides for a couple of miles while a calf’s head bounces under her tail with every trotting step is not the ideal situation to ensure survival.

For any of us.

So I decided to build a portable corral near the windbreak.

I stopped by a feed store that was holding a retirement sale, but I would have to sell a bunch of my heifers so I could afford to buy the required metal panels for the corral.

That didn’t make sense.

I looked around the ranch at the metal panels currently being used as temporary fences.

My brother-in-law says to watch what is temporary. It becomes permanent.

These temporary fences have been there so long, I couldn’t remember when we put them in place.

I have some boards in stacks so I started building wooden panels to replace the metal panels.

That meant I needed to find some screws.

Fortunately, I had cleaned up the shop back in January and vaguely remembered seeing some wood screws.

My daughter, Abby, is taking wood shop at school so she measured and sawed while I screwed the panels together.

My brother, Roger, helped me substitute wooden panels -- that I suspect will be permanent -- for the temporary metal panels and then haul the metal panels to the cow pasture.

I’ll lay out some straw before below-0 temperatures and snow fall this weekend.

I’m as ready as I can be.

I’m only worried about a muddy spot where the road crosses the creek. The culvert is iced up so the water runs around. Every time I drive through it, the spot gets deeper. I might have a bit of trouble towing a horse trailer across that spot in a blinding snowstorm.

So I looked for an alternative route.

I spotted two other tracks, one as wide as a wagon and the other as wide as a pickup.

Apparently, Alistair Graham, who ran this ranch for about 80 years, had the same problem at that creek crossing and came up with the same solution.

Somehow, that made me feel good.

Alistair and I both do the best we can with what we have.

Then we hope it is enough.