Happenings at home and at work with the animals.

Since we live on a major highway, our yard is fenced to keep the dogs safe. They love swimming in the ponds when it's hot, but that means someone has to take them, and we don't always have time. So, a couple of weeks ago, when the temperature hit 90 degrees, we went to the local hardware store and bought them a baby pool.

They couldn't wait for it to fill. They were in it before we even got the hose in and turned on.

This is our 9-year-old Lab, Maggie. She looks old, with lots of gray hair, but she doesn't act any older than our 2-year-old, Boone. Her favorite thing to do is dig in the pool and splash water all over herself. Then she takes her nose and dips it in the water like she's retrieving something, even though she's not.

Here's Boone digging at the bottom of the pool. I wonder where he learned to do that!

They were enjoying the pool so much, even though it's not really big enough for two big ol' Labrador Retrievers (Maggie weighs 109, Boone 118). Since we didn't have much planned for the day, we decided to really make their day, so we took them down to the pond. When Maggie hits the pond, she loses herself in her own world. She sees nothing and nobody, and she hears nothing and nobody. She would swim for days if we'd let her. Once she gets in, she is in until we manage to trick her into getting out, which normally takes about 30 minutes. We've timed her swimming adventures, and her longest swim was just shy of an hour. Now, when I say she swam for almost an hour, I mean she swam. She didn't get out once. She absolutely loves swimming, and since she has arthritis now, the vet says swimming is the best exercise for her - and she is more than happy to exercise.

Boone, on the other hand, loves to swim, but he also loves to run in the pasture. One of his favorite things to do is run around for a few minutes, then run full speed and splash into the pond. Once he's in the pond, he swims over to where Maggie is and asks her to play. However, she turns tail and swims away. He's finally (after two years) realizing that when Maggie is swimming, he is on his own.

In other animal news, we have three geese at work that have been making regular appearances for the past few weeks. Our back parking lot slopes, so when it rains, it creates a nice pool for them. They started out just bathing in the pool after a rain, and within a few days, they began making themselves at home. They seem friendly and will walk right up to you.

Here is one of them standing tall on the company truck in the back parking lot. It looks like he's checking out our shipping department through the dock door. Maybe he's planning a trip to tour the building in the near future.

A few days later, our visitors helped themselves to some goodies in the community garden in front of the building. Provided with food for the taking, as well as a nice watering hole for bathing, I think they just might be here to stay.

The cool season pasture grass at my Osage County Kansas farm is alive and well, and growing so nicely that I rotated the Highland cattle onto their first new break of 2010 last Sunday. They performed very nicely through winter on the standing hay from one of my warm season, native grass paddocks (requiring hay due to deep snow only twice) but were beginning to put pressure on the fences. Although the farm’s pastures consist of mostly native warm season perennials such as big and little bluestem and Eastern gama grass, there are several sizeable patches that contain bluegrass, fescue, brome and some native cool season grass species. One reason that I like to keep the cattle on range all year is that it helps me select for thriftiness on grass. Another reason is that the cattle will work over small cedar trees and tear up various thickets that the farm’s previous managers allowed to grow and shade out the more valuable pasture grass.

Moving cattle to fresh pasture breaks is compelling work. In this case, I simply called the herd from deep in a thicket-filled draw to a gate they haven’t been through in about 6 months. Gus, my goofy, but ever so helpful, Border Collie circled the quarter mile behind the group and walked the animals up the slope and through the gate. No barking, no cattle romping, no muss, no fuss. And one by one as they passed through the gate, their heads went down – buried in fresh cool-season pasture grass.  Another rite of spring accomplished for 2010.

The herd will move many times throughout the growing season. In a month or so, they will tell me they want to move long before it is time. But moving the cattle to fresh grass on a regular basis is key to producing grassfed beef efficiently, and in a way that improves soil, pasture and water quality on the farm. With each passing of the herd, the soil organic matter content increases, soil water percolation and water holding capacities improve, and the plant matrix diversity increases. When I began grazing in earnest in the early 1990s, people thought I spent too much time with my cattle. When they saw my weaning weights and tasted our beef, they wanted to know how to do it. Grassfed and management intensive grazing isn’t a panacea by any stretch, but for me, it works – I really like spending time with the cattle.

Last Fall I promised to tell you about driving our cattle home from our west pastures. However, that adventure didn’t go quite as planned.

It started out as a drizzly day, and quickly progressed to a windy day with horizontal freezing rain, not at all conducive to photography – especially when I forgot the camera. My husband, Jim, and I arrived at the west pastures with a manual transmission diesel pickup with his ATV loaded in the back. I had just had eye surgery and was not seeing particularly well, and am generally not allowed to drive the stick shift vehicles since I tend to ‘round off the gears’. Jim is an excellent herdsman, and is gentle with his cattle, so they trust him and come to his calls. He started calling them as we drove into the pasture, and they began to follow the pickup as planned. Jim was going to have them follow him on the ATV and my job was to meet them on the road to help drive them home. But, to make matters more complicated, the ATV refused to start, and the herd was surrounding us, understanding that it was time for them to head home. Jim decided to walk ahead of them, in the freezing rain, across the pasture. It had to be a very long mile for him, but he looked very much like the Pied Piper with his entire herd behind him. I snapped a couple of photos with my cell phone, but you can imagine what those looked like. It took awhile, but I found my way to the gate and met him on the road, and we drove the herd home. After hot showers, dry clothes, and a pot of coffee, we were finally warm.

Driving the herd out to the west pastures yesterday was, by contrast, a splendid adventure. Aside from yet another ATV incident, flat tire this time, all went reasonably well.

Jim, our son, Will, and Jim’s brother, Rich, rounded up the herd at around 6:00 a.m. The cattle seem to know when it is time to travel and they were eager to head out. I say that because they were literally running toward the west, making it hard for their month-old calves to keep up. We drive cattle using ATV’s rather than horses now – partly because our horses are old and deserve a rest, and partly because ATV’s stop when you want them to. [photo 1 – to come]

The cows did not keep up their initial pace and slowed considerably after a mile or so. The guys were headed across neighboring pastures, a distance of approximately 6 miles. I stayed home to prepare a picnic lunch and met them with the diesel and trailer when they reached the highway. Crossing a highway with a herd of cattle can range from being tricky to disastrous, but this year was remarkably uneventful. There was no traffic from either direction, so the cattle crossed and headed down the gravel road on the way to the west pastures. As mentioned earlier, one ATV blew a tire when Jim ran over a broken off tree stump, so we loaded the ATV into the trailer, and Jim hopped into the pickup with me. Our daughter, Laura, agreed to walk to help drive the herd. Will gave her a ride to catch up with the cattle. 

The wind had picked up, and the road we were on carries fairly heavy tractor-trailer traffic to a feedlot, so there was a lot of dust.

We needed to travel about 5 miles along this road to the point where we headed across pasture to our destination.

There is always at least one cow bent on reaching greener pastures ahead of time who jumps a fence and has to be redirected back to the herd.

The calves tended to fall behind the cows, preferring the grass in the road ditch to the gravel road.

Will grew a little impatient at times with the 4 mile-per hour pace.

Will received instructions about which gates to close up ahead while Jim gathered more rocks for his make-shift cattle ‘motivator’, consisting of an antifreeze jug found in the ditch that he filled with gravel. He would toss this behind the cattle startling them, so they would continue to move along.

Good friend, Cole Stevens, who helps us drive cattle each spring, took his turns walking.

Laura or Will occasionally helped a trucker navigate through the herd by leading them through on the ATV.

As the cows traveled further, the herd tended to spread out, which actually made it easier for the traffic to move through the herd.

Cattle drives also provide ample opportunities for some father-daughter bonding time.

We finally reached the point where we let down the fence and crossed the neighbor’s pasture to get to our pasture.

Jim stapled the fence wires back to the posts and continued on foot behind the herd. Laura and I drove the rig around the road to the pasture and waited for the herd to arrive. We could see the herd at a distance and watched as Jim counted the cattle as they passed through his gate.

The guys waited for the cows and calves to pair up, and then headed toward us.

When the drive was finished, we rested and had a picnic in the make-shift shade of the trailer, while Laura sent text messages to her boyfriend.

The drive took about 5 hours from home to the pastures 13 miles to the west.

Jim returned to the pasture later last evening to check on his herd and make certain all the calves had found their mothers. His job for the next day involved helping another neighbor drive cattle to a different pasture.

Years ago, instead of making hay to carry our Angus herd through the winter, we stockpiled pasture and fed the standing hay through the dark months. This year, we decided to try the same experiment with the Highland cattle here in Kansas. The winters are milder here in Kansas than in Ohio, where we winter grazed the Angus cattle. And since the farm has way more grass than animals to eat it, I figured winter grazing the Highland cattle would work. In fact, it appears to be working quite well, so far, in spite of the snow and ice that has accumulated off and on in the last several weeks.

This morning it is already in the 50s, so it hardly feels like winter, but suffice it to say, there is plenty of good standing cool season forage (with about 25 percent green) in the lows, and more shaded areas. The warm season patches are completely dormant, and not good for much more than roughage, but the combination has been more than sufficient to keep the Highland's condition scores up and the young heifers and bull gaining and growing.

Winter grazing isn't for everyone, but I believe in letting cattle and other highly adapted domestic animals have a chance at fulfilling their genetic potentials ... I don't mind subdividing and carefully managing pastures year-round either. People are most skeptical about winter grazing because of the chance for snow cover. I have discovered that seeding some of the stockpiled pastures with small square or little Allis-Chalmers-made round bales is all you need to train the herd to look under the snow for sustenance. Alternatively, you can sprinkle some of their favorite range cubes (in front of them) in the snow on some of the tallest stockpile. In both cases, the cattle will inadvertently discover the good grass while rooting out their "treats." Once trained, the herd doesn't bat an eyelash when you ask them to get after the good grass under the snow.

Days like today make winter grazing a complete no brainer. Why on earth would I carry hay to them, when they can harvest the hay themselves? Winter grazing of some sort has the added benefit of spreading excess nutrients around. Instead of finding tons of manure around hay feeders, the Highland cattle deposit it wherever they happen to be ... the way nature intended it. When I have fed hay, I fed it to the cattle on the meadows it came from, in windrows and not in bale feeders. But that's a story for another day.