No word of the whereabouts
of La Niña 3, one more dry year
waiting in the wings to sell cows
and feed more hay—instead,
8 days rain out of 9 and more
to come, bare canyon green.
We are helpless, flood or drought,
her fickle Nature always serving
what she wants, anywhere, anytime.
Posted in Photographs, POEMS 2023, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, Drought, green, Mother Nature, photography, poetry, rain, rainbow, weather
Color comes with cold and wet
within the canyon, even before
the creek flows or sycamores burn
leather brown to shed their clothes—
white bodies tangled in a pagan dance
to gods unknown. Orioles return
as sparks in the brush, levity
in the pink overcast of dawn.
We glean the fallen skeletons
of oak and brittle manzanita
to fill the woodstove. Curious cattle
come to wonder what we’re about.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, colors, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, firewood, Manzanita, photography, poetry, rain, sycamores, weather
They’ve taken Saturday’s rain away
with future promises
like plastic magic debt
no one intends to pay.
We’ve been here before,
crooning to godesses
not to forget us
like the hopeless homeless.
We are this ground
rooted into the future
like the plodding lives of cattle,
trusting, trusting, trusting….
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, Cosmos, Drought, godesses, Monarch Butterfly, photography, poetry, rain, trusting, weather
1.
Gray dust clouds rising
behind cows down powdered trails
off these bare mountains.
2.
The diesel feed truck
awakes a bawling chorus
to claim the canyon.
3.
All imperative
and hungry, it twists our guts—
La Niña pending.
Posted in Haiku 2022, Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, Drought, haiku, La Nina, photography, poetry, water, weather
We’re talking cattle
with a rising moon in June,
making plans for cows and calves—
the gather and sort to town,
where old friends shuffle
across the sale barn’s catwalk,
boot soles sliding, glad
to be moving among the living
when so many are not.
No one cares about our conversations,
the moon eavesdrops when it wants
just to measure our progress.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, moon, photography, poetry
Say good-bye to your mothers
for the long ride
all you children—
the truck is clean
shavings on the floor.
Driver said it snowed
before he left,
needed chains on Donner
rolling empty here in May.
We shake our heads
about the weather,
damn little rain,
the creek’s gone dry.
With a week of winds
the oaks have come alive,
tree limbs dancing
like separate tongues
trying to lick the sky.
We shipped our last load of Wagyu X calves to Snake River Farms on Tuesday as we continue to gather and wean our Angus calves. Both cows and calves have done well despite the extremely dry spring, in part because of our heavy culling that cut our cow herd by a third after only six inches of rain the year before. With drought across the Western US, cow numbers are down everywhere resulting in a stronger market than we’ve seen in years. With unpredictable weather, higher costs for grain and inflation, we may be raising beef we can’t afford to eat.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2022, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, cows, Drought, Dry Creek, photography, poetry, rain, Snake River Farms, Wagyu X Calves, weather
After I mowed the lawn, I opened the gate for the cows and their Wagyu X calves to the horse pasture to eat the grass and weeds horses don’t like to lessen the fire danger and make it easier to spot a rattlesnake at a distance. A treat for the cattle as we wait to process their calves on Tuesday and a treat for us to see them in the evenings.
We let our big dog Buster, a Great Pyrenees/German Shepard X that was part of the litter dumped on Dry Creek Road several years ago, loose to work at night keeping the coyotes, feral pigs, raccoons, skunks, etc. out of the yard. We don’t want him to make a mistake while we’re sleeping, so we move the cattle out before dark.
Last night, Robbin walked and worked our Border Collie Tessa on commands to gently ease them toward and out the open gate—a great exercise and confidence builder for them both. Tessa has been with us enough around the cows to know how we work them (old people slow) and plenty of herd in her breeding. I’m guessing they’ll do it again tonight, it’s been good watching.
Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal
Tagged Buster, cattle, dogs, evenings, Old People Slow, Tessa, training, Wagyu X Calves
We’ve begun processing our Wagyu calves with a second round of vaccinations for Snake River Farms that we plan to ship in the first week of May. Each calf gets an Electronic Identification (EID) button and a tag to match at the same time. These calves are from our first-calf heifers that we poured the hay to from last July into December because of the short feed and to keep our first-calf heifers in shape to cycle and breed back. We don’t have to run the numbers to know that these calves won’t bring enough to pay for the hay we fed.
Every feed season is different, even in a drought. The Christmas rains saved our bacon, over 3 inches or nearly a third of our rainfall to date. And again, in the nick of time, two storm at the end of February and beginning of March that offered nearly 1 ½ inches. The three events made pretty decent feed in the corrals above and elsewhere as we approach the end our rainy season—nothing forecast for the next two weeks—proving once again that it’s not the quantity of rain, but the timing that’s most important in the cattle business.
With a shortage of water to irrigate alfalfa in California, hay will be expensive. Having cut our herd by a third last year (6 inches total), we hope there will be enough old feed to carry us through until November without feeding much hay in our upper country. However, we’ll have to help our younger cows in our lower country where the south and west slopes have already turned brown. How many will be the question.
We couldn’t keep any replacement heifers last year, and may not this year as the market gets stronger. We’ll be making lots of decisions in the coming thirty days as we begin to harvest this year’s crop and plan for the next.
Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, cattle business, Drought, economics, Hay, native feed, photographs, rain, rainfall, Ranch Journal, Wagyu calves, water, weather
Misting, light snow on Sulphur Peak (3,400’) this morning, we ‘ve enjoyed 1.02” received thus far from the last two days of this season-saving rain—a little more scheduled for today.
But it was the 0.48” we received on the 23rd of February that truly saved our grass after 3 months of nothing but a few heavy dews. The ground was so dry that it sucked all the moisture up by the next day to the extent the mud grips on the feed truck left no tracks. The grass, that has been so thin in the Flat where we’ve been feeding our first-calf heifers since last July, finally filled in, and now is beginning to grow. Add this inch and we’ll be good to go for three weeks or so, depending on temperatures.
Robbin and I, with the help of Allie, Terri and our neighbors, got our last bunch of calves branded on Wednesday before this rain. Due to last year’s heavy culling because of the drought, our bunches were small this year, but the cows and calves looked great. Whether or not we can make ends meet on so few numbers remains to be seen in the marketplace, now that the weather seems to want to cooperate—we have hope.
The third variable to survival in the cattle business has always been politics. With the world in turmoil because of the invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent impacts, anything can happen to disrupt the marketplace, inflation and the pandemic yet still in the wings. Unresolved issues regarding the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), passed by the urban majority in 2014, adds to an uncertain future for all agriculture in California, one that will undoubtedly include foreclosures and lots of litigation for years to come. Meanwhile, imposed fines and the cost of water may be too great to farm in California if the State has its way, once the richest agricultural region in the world.
Nothing stays the same.
Only nothing is normal.
Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal
Tagged California, cattle, Drought, politics, rain, SGMA, water, weather
Long dark shadows in the canyons,
cattle hard to see. They don’t need us now,
heads down somewhere on the mountain,
ground too wet to help them anyway—
all the excuses I need to write poetry.
We fed hay all last year, filled the barn
three times waiting for a rain. These Christmas
storms: miracles to rejuvenate the earth
for man and beast, birds and insects,
steep hillsides begging to explode in leafy
salad greens—iridescent gifts in the sunlight,
like the old days, for years in a row that
have since gone dry and farther in between.
Nothing stays the same, just ask the skeletons
of old oaks where the natives ground acorns.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged cattle, Christmas, Drought, grass, Natives, New Year's, oak skeletons, poetry, rain
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