Moooving

Seeding officially ended on Wednesday.  The goal is always to be done before June 1, and they went pretty hard the last week to make that happen.  We took the boys and families out for supper to celebrate on Tuesday night (M only had five rounds left so we weren't too premature).  Now we turn our attention to ranching again. 

Yesterday we played a game of musical pastures.  We needed to get the replacement heifers home so we can start the AI process next week and needed to get the cows with calves to their summer pasture.  The cow-calf pairs were roaming between two pastures so in the morning M and Junior pushed them all to the south pasture.  That gave us a buffer zone for when the replacement heifers came in.

Moving heifers is pretty easy.  Once you get them headed in the right direction (west), they're off and move pretty quickly.  It was about a two-mile jaunt, but it didn't take long.  Then we rounded up the cows and calves and headed east with them to the pasture adjacent to where the heifers had been. 

Moving pairs is always an adventure, and the more cows and calves you have the more difficult it can be.  Last year we had cows strung out for a mile and calves not keeping up and turning back looking for their mamas.  We tried a bit of a different tack this time and moved them a mile into the neighbor's water corral where they could rest and pair up (sort of) and then moved them the second mile.  Those on the 4-wheelers (M and R) were busy keeping the calves going in the right direction.  The cows knew where they were going and were happy to go.  We could have used another 4-wheeler, but one of ours is down at the moment.  We found two sick calves in the process.  One got a ride in the pickup and the other slowly made its way.  They received some medicine when we reached our destination.  I hope they're doing okay today.

M and R are busy getting the backhoe ready so they can try to repair the water line at the barn before we have heifers in there next weekend.

Still no progress on the bathroom project since our rain event turned out to be nothing but wind.  I only need an hour, but an hour is really hard to get sometimes.