Our Life on the South Dakota Prairie ~ by Missy

  

Fall 2011

My husband Joe and I live in western South Dakota. The ranch that we live and work on has been in his family for over 65 years. Our children are the sixth generation to live on the creek that runs by our house. The prairie we live on is beautiful and fierce.

Fall 2011

Some would say we are isolated; but we do not feel that way. We feel like we are home. Sure, the nearest grocery store is an hour’s drive away and our nearest neighbor is a mile away. To us, that is a small price to pay to be able to do what we love.

Spring 2013

What we love is raising our herd of Black Angus cattle. We love to teach our kids how to care for our cows and calves. We love to watch calves be born, to see them take their first steps, to watch them run and kick and play in our pastures. We walk through them, feed them by hand, and pet them.

May 2013

We work hard all year to ensure that they and their mama cows stay safe, do not become ill, have plenty of fresh green grass to graze in summer and baled hay to eat in winter, plenty of healthy water to drink, plenty of room to roam the prairies while having shelter from storms and winds. And we take special care to do this in a way that is as stress-free as possible for them.

April 2013

This is no easy task. It means getting up in the night to walk out to the corral or the barn with a flashlight to see if any cows need assistance with their calves. It means doing this several times a night for several weeks in early spring no matter the weather – rain, sleet, snow, and wind. It means that my husband does not leave our ranch for weeks at a time so that he can check on calves hourly.

April 2013

It means working for weeks cutting hay, raking hay, baling hay, stacking hay, and moving hay in the summer. All while praying that it is enough hay when it is time to feed in the winter. Feeding means going out in the elements daily with a tractor to roll out half-ton-plus bales of hay on top of the snow-covered prairie.

 

Summer 2012

In the short time between these calving, haying, and feeding seasons; there is always work to be done. Fence-fixing, corral-building, barn-repairing, gate-building, tractor repairing, well digging, pipeline laying.

Fall 2013

 

Not to mention setting up water tanks, moving feeders, checking cattle, moving cattle, working cattle. This work might be done just a few yards from our house and barns, but much of it is done out in the pasture, miles away from our house and all other signs of civilization. All of this work is hard, back-breaking, physical work, done on a landscape that can be awe-inspiring, heart-warming, and romantic. The key word being ‘can.’

Fall 2012

This prairie can be gentle, it can be calm, it can be beautiful, it can be nourishing.

It can give, and it can take.

October 6, 2013

This lesson of give-and-take was played out in an especially painful way last week. We are used to wind, we are used to rain, we are used to snow, we are used to blizzards and for the most part, people who live in South Dakota are prepared for these things to happen. But there was no way that anyone could be prepared for what happened in western South Dakota on October 4, 2013. 

October 10, 2013

By Missy 
 (Joe's Wife)

California Trip

 We have been in a class for the last 2 years called Beef SD. Its a group of young beef producers from South Dakota that are being exposed to every aspect of the beef industry. We just got back from California to explore their agriculture. First stop San Francisco.
            We landed around noon, ran to check into our hotel and headed down to the Fisherman's Warf. Its a bit touristy, but for good reason it has a beautiful view of the bay, Alcatraz, the Bay and Golden gate bridges when the fog rolls out. We had a wonderful afternoon on the bay a perfect way to unwind after two planes and five hours of flight.(I do not fly well)

McShane's Nursery in the Salinas Valley was kind of an eye opener for me. I have been to a lot of nurseries, but I never really thought about at what goes into that kind of operation. It seems to me that the owner Steve McShane is on the front lines of Agriculture. Think about it, your local nursery is the place so many people go to learn how to grow things. Most people don't have a yard big enough for a cow but most people have a space big enough for a strawberry plant. If I lived anywhere near this place, I would be there all the time.

 

Monterey, CA: Well, the only time I get to see sand is usually in someone's roping arena and the Pacific is something kind of foreign to me. Its the tide, it rolls in and out, its hypnotic. I looked all over for sea shells and with the help of some good friends we found some. I don't think a parent should go to the ocean and not bring back some shells for the kids.

Turlock Livestock Exchange: Back to something I am familiar with, sale barns. This barn was very different than the ones we have back home. Turlock is located in a valley with a heavy dairy population as well as a good beef cow population in the mountains around it, so they have sales three times a weak. The ring was very small compared to the Dakotas but these people sell dairy cow one at a time where we tend to sell cattle a pot load at a time.

The California State Fair: Everywhere I go I usually wear a hat, now most places I have been to I will here "cowboy" or "are you from Texas". The whole time in California I was only called "cowboy" once fallowed up by "Clint Black" from a gentleman who genuinely seemed excited to see a "cowboy" at a fair. The State fair was immense, To me the best part of the fair was seeing each counties booth describing what they contribute to California's agriculture.

Wine Country: To see these vines growing everywhere along the hillsides and valleys blew my mind. Its beautiful, not just aesthetic, but something else. That which has been cultivated by the hands of men has something special about it . Some of these vines have been growing since the sixties. Between California's regulations, fungus, frost, deer, and birds I think the wine growers of California have the toughest job in agriculture. I am not much of a wine person, usually I stick to whiskey and scotch. However after seeing the process along with the trials and tribulations of the vineyards I hold a new found respect for wine.

Feeding Crane Farms: Organic farming is something I read about from time to time, so it was something to see in person. We have a good size garden every year and its beyond me how to keep it organic, with all the weeds and bugs. It turns out all it takes is man power and a good hoe (the tool, not the other one). This fella was interesting, trying to make a living growing organic produce on eight acres of land was inspiring, it seemed crazy but inspiring all the same. At the state fair I ran into the PETA booth and a very nice woman started up a conversation with me. We had a nice conversation about the food industry, she told me "cows can't eat corn", which was news to me because a cow has four chambers in its stomach and I eat corn with my one chamber stomach. At the end of it all we agreed to disagree, but I had one last thought. "Do you eat organic produce?" PETA gal "Yes I only eat organic, no GMO's" me " That's cool, I just visited an organic farm today and you will never guess what they use for fertilizer." PETA gal "what?" me "Fish meal and chicken meal, you know ground up fish and ground up chicken" I shook her hand and went on my way. All in all a wonderful trip.

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.