engineered equipment

When picking up the 1400 lb bales in the hay yard occasionally the bale netting tears and the hay falls out.  This leaves hay loose on the ground that is considerable work to pitch onto the truck by hand.  Since we didn't have a sweep attachment for the tractor Blake found old bend sweep teeth in the salvage iron pile on the ranch and engineered a sweep head attachment that fits onto the tractor's bucket.  This took 4 hours of work, but saved considerable money. 

more help

The Hruby family have moved into the lower place buildings and they will help part time on the ranch.  Dan and Kimmie will do the work for now, however they have 4 boys that will make an excellent cattle crew in the future.  For the near future they are stuck watching and learning as 3 of them are doing here.  The oldest is already along the alley moving calves forward to Blake.  This winter they do the Sunday chores so Arden doesn't have to spend 2+ hours driving to do an hour or 2 of work, that has been much appreciated.

feeding corn

We have marketed the non Akaushi calves so have 304 DNA verified 1/2 and 3/4 Akaushi coming yearlings now weaned.  We are doing a limited feeding trial to see if feeding a higher energy ration of corn to 20 head of the lighter calves would move them up to a more average weight.  Then determine if they have an improved weight gain by grass time if they can maintain the extra growth through the grazing period.  We weigh them now, at pasture turn out and again in July at marketing.  Of course we have a control subgroup that are only on pasture with alfalfa supplement to compare gains to.  If the trial shows an economic advantage, in the future we may feed the whole group corn.