Fishing

Well we finished haying!! So it was about time to take a few days and just relax. I took my wife and our boys to the Missouri River to catch some walleyes. Seafood is my third favorite protein. I don't really view it as meat, more like a vegetable. The boys caught some nice fish and had two good days in the boat. Now we're under the gun again, we're getting ready to head to San Francisco to tour some of their ag producers to see how things work in California. It should be fun.

The grind

Making hay...it's a grind. Twelve to sixteen hours a day in a tractor is enough to drive a man crazy. I have been living in this machine for just about a month and it shows. At this point my cab is a combination of a tool box and a garbage can. In the cab of this tractor I have an old am/fm cassette deck, a lot of Chris Ledoux tapes have been ran through that puppy. But with the amount of hours I've spent in here I still love making hay. It's a felling of accomplishment at the end of the day .

Checking cows

Well, this spring we had some relief from a two year drought. However  we are heading into July and August our hottest months. Most of the dams and dugouts have shriveled up to mud holes. Thank heavens for good wells, pipeline, water tanks, and good neighbors. Our cows are doing well and I think this might be the best crop of calves we have ever had on our place. I made a big change in our breeding program, we had been using real nice angus bulls for a long time and I wanted to use the best bulls in the breed, so last year we AI'd all our cows. 

Now in my part of the world a lot of folks said "we were out of our damn mind" and "don't you have enough to do without doing the bulls job?" I have always had this belief that if your neighbors think what your doing Is crazy, you might be on to something. My Dad likes to give me hell on this subject, but I know deep down somewhere he likes the results. Dad was helping us pull CIDIRS this spring and asked me "why don't you let the bulls do it" and my four year old son said "Because bulls don't have arms!!!!" It's hard to argue with the logic of a four year old. 

I have always said "we well never be the biggest, but we can be the best". We have a long way to go but were working on it, always.

My new blog

Welcome to my new blog! Here you will get to see what it takes to get beef from pasture to plate along with raising a family on the hard pan soils of South Dakota.