Tis the season to be getting the cows to greener pastures. We had a group of first-calf mamas and calves at my mom's and with my nephews wedding coming up and extra people around we thought it best to get them moved out to their summer pasture. We hauled them out and that went pretty smoothly. R would haul a load to the pasture while M and I sorted out another load. There was another group near Richland that just had to move across the road. The river runs through the pasture and washes out some fence every year so that required some fence repair first, but they are at home there now.
We had two groups at home, and I actually missed out on the initial moving of both of them. The first group moved when we were ready to move them. The second group decided on their own it was time to go and broke out a gate at the water corral. The guys fought them for a couple of days, but then decided it wasn't worth the fight and sent them on their way east. The bad thing was that they were then in adjacent pastures and we didn't want them to be in that situation for too long. M was kind of dragging his feet because he wanted to get a generator backup for the solar well in the pasture they needed to go to, and our generator burned up in the fire. R was really pushing to get them moved up there anyway so on a nice day we decided to do it.
Kade rode his little 4-wheeler up to the pasture to help us out. What should have taken a half hour took all afternoon after we discovered some broken wires and calves on the opposite side of the fence as their mothers. Since we weren't sure what was what and who was who we pushed a group into a holding pen between pastures and kicked them out into the new pasture by pairs, 100+ pairs so it took awhile. Poor Kade at 11:00 was asking when was lunch. I had to run home and get sorting paddles, etc. so I loaded up a cooler of drinks and grabbed some snacks (pretty slim pickings in that department at my house). At least Kade wouldn't completely starve before we got him back home.
The sorting didn't go too bad except that the aging eyes made reading tags a bit of a challenge. In the end, we had five cows without calves, not a bad percentage in my opinion. We knew where the calf of one of those was, three found theirs on their own and we remembered that the last missing calf had died earlier. Success!
Just as we were finishing up the wind came up, the clouds rolled in and it started to rain. I thought Kade and I should head for home before it got nasty so we took off, he on his little 4-wheeler and me on mine. We were just about to the gate when there was a big flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. Scared the crap out of me and when I stopped to open the gate I saw that Kade was bawling as it scared him, too. He said he didn't like thunder and I assured him that I didn't like it either. I urged him on since it seemed a better idea to keep moving than to sit there in the rain. M caught up with us when we were about halfway home and shortly after that the skies cleared and the rain stopped. Kade and I went to the house for dry clothes and a sandwich, and he was feeling a lot better about life by the time R arrived at home.
Next on the agenda is our AI process and putting bulls out. Then we can ignore them for a little while and hope they stay put.
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