A Little Hormonal

We've been busy with various things lately, but the most important has been artificial inseminating our heifers.  We gave them shots last Saturday.  We always joke about whether we'll chase them in or lead them into the corral.  A small group of them was in the northeast corner of the pasture and R rounded them up.  I was at the barn and watched them come through the holding pen and into the corral before R and M had even gotten to the ones on the west side.  They patiently waited in the corral for the rest of the group to get there.  There are advantages to bucket feeding them all winter.  They worked really well through the chute and it took M, R and I only a couple of hours to give 85 head shots and apply heat detection patches.

I was a little bit worried that we'd have some ready to breed on Sunday afternoon.  We had an important event that evening--Sawyer's birthday party--which had been postponed until we finished seeding.  Nothing was ready on Sunday, thank goodness, so they hit it hard on Monday.  I was kind of disappointed that I had to work and missed most of it.  I did hurry home from work to help with the last group.  By the time we finished up with those and took them to pasture it was 8:30 so we had supper around 9:30.  Everyone was ready for bed immediately after!  We were up bright and early on Tuesday morning and finished up the last ones and moved them to pasture, finishing just before noon.

We had much better weather than last year when it was drizzling the whole time, and the heifers came into heat a lot better.  We're hoping that means we'll get a better catch.  We had lots of sun and not much wind and then a rain shower after we had finished.

It's quiet around the barn again now and will be even more quiet once we get the bulls to pasture, probably this weekend, 

We're turning to other projects now.  The solar panels for the pump in the pasture are back up and water is flowing.  We'll be moving the cows to that pasture soon.  We have lots of fencing to do--like always.  We've worked on the new hay yard and now are moving a fence out of a bog to slightly higher ground.  We put some brace posts in this afternoon and were heading to the area where we need to put in some more when M got the skid steer stuck in a coulee.  I knew I wasn't going to take the pickup across there but thought he'd get across.  We didn't have a chain to pull it out so called it a day.  M didn't have time to go get a chain and go back and pull it out before he had to leave for a meeting.  Pretty sure it'll still be there tomorrow and hopefully R can help him get it out instead of me.

We were in prime tick habitat and sure enough, I had one crawling on my neck when I got home.  I need to go shower and make sure there aren't any more.  They give me the heebie jeebies!