Getting Back To It

After the awesome sale at Perks Ranch which averaged $6,197 and saw our heifer selling to Mallorie Phelps it was back to the tractor for me. Driving the tractor and pulling the grain cart is where I remained well into November.

I’ll tell you what you can get a heck of a lot of thinking done when you spend that much time driving around in a corn field at an average of 6 mph. I probably rethought the whole direction of this operation a couple dozen times. It can be maddening but is a job that needs to be done. The crop was much better then we expected as our rain shut off almost completely in July. Our own corn crop wasn’t great and got burnt up before we could even get it cut for silage but luckily we were able to get some from our neighbor. The cows are currently munching on that silage and loving it.

Crystal and I made the trip to Grandview/CMR during harvest to watch their historic dispersal in hopes that we would be able to get a three or four breds to help increase our herd and to diversify our genetic base. Well our plan was a good one as we really liked a lot of the animals they were selling. We got there late on Friday and didn’t get to walk through all of the bred heifers. We were able to pick one up and I think she will be a good addition to the herd but isn’t exactly the outcross the we went there looking for. Friday night we walked through almost all the cows and between then and Saturday morning we picked out 15 that we would really like to take home. Well it can be very hard to build a herd when you have champagne taste on a fast food budget and we weren’t able to pick anything up. Those 15 females that we picked out averaged $14,000!

Building this herd obviously isn’t going to be cheap with not only purebred prices being high but we are also going to be paying more for bred recipients next year… No one said it would be easy, only that it’d be worth it.