Tag Archives: Drought

Wagyu X Branding 2015

Posted on January 14, 2015 by John | 8 comments

Maggie Loverin checks her pork loins adorned with grapefruit and oranges after we branded our Wagyu X calves yesterday, while the sun tried to break through the bad-air haze and remnants of Valley fog.

Noticeably quicker and more unpredictable to rope than our Angus calves, the Wagyu are a challenge to head and heel, real work for everyone. But we had a great day and ate well!

Well into our branding season now, we’re beginning to wear down a little, especially with the extra weight of wondering and worrying when it’s going to rain, repercussions of the drought still raw. One topic of conversation in the branding pen included the different kinds of bloat, fairly rare to most of us, but taking casualties in Antelope Valley, half-mile west of here.

All that methane gas that can’t escape inflates the cow and kills her usually leaving an orphan calf—a slurry of foamy gas in the cow’s rumen that can’t be released with an external needle or tube down her throat was news to us, that has come from our lush and washy feed in certain places on the flat ground, mostly filaree. We’ve had several of our cows blow up and subside on their own with a regular supplement of dry hay. There are also commercial free-choice products to prevent bloat that take time to incorporate into the cow’s system, but without assurance that everyone gets some.

How long this situation will last is unknown, but we know a rain would change things. With no likelihood for the rest of the month from any weather-predicting source, we get the work done in love with what we do.

8 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged Bovine bloat, branding, Calves, Drought, Dry Creek, photographs, rain, Wagyu X, weather

RANCH JOURNAL: JANUARY 9, 2015

Posted on January 9, 2015 by John | 2 comments

1.
In the shallow ground and clay,
mats of filaree cling like crimson moss
after frost as if holding their breath for rain.
Yet warm enough for mustard bloom
in ungrazed traps for cattle, bits of yellow
at the tender tips of leafy greens—
all of the same seed that natives came
from Badger to gather when I was young.
White heads of Shepherd’s Purse nod
in bloom above the short-cropped blades
of lusher grass as if already spring.
Steep south slopes struggle, more mottled
brown than green—we beg and wait for rain:
busy fixing fences, branding calves, feeding hay
to bloating cows after years of drought
as high-pressure herds a warm jet stream north
to feed Alberta Clippers East with unwanted snow.

2.
We crave some sort of normal
that has become a hazy dream:
of cattle fat and happy, of time
to idly wile and waste
that old men will never see again.
Yet full of trust, trailing tidbits
from the gods, we chase it
like the feed truck still believing—
and that is normal despite extremes.

2 Comments

Posted in Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

Tagged branding, cows, Drought, Dry Creek, feeding, normal, poetry, rain, shallow ground, weather, wildflowers, Yokuts

Wordless Wednesday — Grass-Starved

Posted on January 7, 2015 by John | 2 comments

2 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged Drought, Dry Creek, photographs, water, weather, Wordless Wednesday

SABBATH HOME

Posted on January 4, 2015 by John | 8 comments

1.
After the flood of holiday cheer
and four black and frosty mornings
into the New Year, I have lost track
of the names of days

                        celebrating work:
                        friends gathered,
                        calves branded,
                        meat fired

                        and bottles emptied—
                        the hugs and handshakes
                        of neighbors, persistent
                        habits etched deeper

                        in the hard ground
                        worn around our eyes—
                        deeper yet into souls,
                        our pupils as pinholes

                        to grand landscapes
                        either side, missed
                        by the migratory headed
                        somewhere up the road.

2.
We live within a dot on the map,
a speck of dust on a spinning globe
in space and time without end,

holding firm to our moment,
looking back and ahead at once:
no finish line in sight.

3.
We pace our plodding, take all week
to get the work done, to savor details
of small accomplishment in a hazy

scheme of keeping track of seasons
shaped by rain, or lack of it—
our spiritual sustenance comes

with the crescendo of storms
we pray for, almost everyday, keeping
busy while we wait for an answer.

4.
In the winter, we invest in the future
measured by firewood stacked outside
the door, like last year’s crop of acorns
stored by natives, wild and domestic,

we are prepared in this place
to loose track of days scattered
like native cattle into strays
chasing the good grass back home.

8 Comments

Posted in Poems 2015, Ranch Journal

Tagged branding, Calves, cows, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, Home, neighbors, photographs, poetry, rain, Sabbath, water, weather, wildlife

ADIOS TWO-FOURTEEN

Posted on December 31, 2014 by John | 8 comments

If it is Apollo’s steeds chomping at silver bits
I hear behind the ridge, eager to tow the sun,
bring the light like any other day, the future

to this cold, dark canyon—the last of the old load
of days to be dropped off before the New Year—
I’m ready early, hacking my last goodbyes

on paper, screening blessings from the dust
and drought behind me, I trust, having measured-up
to something I can’t see, head bowed, dragging

my feet in yesterday. We must lean into our collars,
move the wheel into new country, scatter virtue
like vigorous seed and hope for a bumper crop.

8 Comments

Posted in Poems 2014, Ranch Journal

Tagged 2014, Drought, Dry Creek, New Year, poetry, rain, water, weather, wildflowers, wildlife

CEREMONY

Posted on December 28, 2014 by John | 8 comments

Blue Oak rounds too big for the woodstove
collect near the splitter in a pile—energy
stored in rings of sun, years of rain—
the severed dead, hard and dry inside.

We look ahead to ceremony, prepare
as we go, set aside the burls and forks,
too twisted to split, for the outside fire
and generations of flickering faces.

I see my mother in my grand-daughter’s
eyes, leave us for a moment for the flames
lapping the remains of a stump—the call
from beyond that burns within us all—

she is drawn away. It is the coming back
to her mother’s lap, her bemused recognition
of going somewhere within white coals
beyond this half-circle of family

that I see my mother in her face
while the meat cooks. We talk, lift glasses
in the smoke that swirls undecidedly
around us, just out of reach of the flames.

Early tracks upon the morning frost,
someone will rise to stir the embers,
to rekindle conversation from cold night
hoping to keep the celebration alive.

WPC(2) — “Warmth”

8 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Poems 2014

Tagged celebration, Ceremony, Christmas, Drought, Dry Creek, Fire, photographs, poetry, rain, water, weather, weekly-photo-challenge

CHRISTMAS 2014

Posted on December 27, 2014 by John | Leave a comment

She breathes, her flesh
with hair enough to hold cattle
and rain to her breast

should it come hard and fast
to fill the canyons. Gray clouds
linger with nothing left

but to offer color and contrast
to these hills greening yet
in Christmas Day’s last light.

Black from the bottoms,
sunset’s shadow crawls
to an island lit with rosy hues

dotted with the dark silhouettes
of cows and calves grazing
the iridescence of fresh green.

She breathes, her flesh
with hair enough to hold us close
to her soft breast.

Merry Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2014 by John | 4 comments

We are blessed this Christmas with the gift of grass after thirty-plus months of historic drought in California, with extraordinary conditions beginning with a 1.76” warm, slow rain at the first of November followed by a thick germination of feed and warm growing weather, and just enough rain to keep it alive until the 2.5” storm two weeks ago. We have good feed now and the calves are growing quickly—from one extreme to the other, a magnificent start to our grass season. Still getting comfortable with the color green, with wet weather, we are grateful and relieved. These hills are miraculously resilient!

And we truly appreciate you and the 400+ others who have followed this blog and endured the drought with us—the recent dusty poems and photographs that are recorded here—and took the time to leave encouraging and sympathetic comments. Thank you all.

Robbin and I wish you a Merry Christmas as the year unwinds, hoping for peace and understanding among all men as we begin 2015, another opportunity to find that common strand within each of us to share. From our family to yours: MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR ☺

4 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged Calves, cows, Drought, Dry Creek, Merry Christmas, photographs, water, weather

WITH EASE

Posted on December 23, 2014 by John | 7 comments

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
– Robinson Jeffers (“The Bloody Sire”)

With ease, we have evolved to softer versions
of ourselves—no longer lean, Dust Bowl men
in coveralls waiting for work and a weather change,

sinew no longer strained to stretch the harvest
of endless furrows. Within earshot of lamenting
old men leaning on fences, I was part of a future

doomed with easy-living, and so I have been
by comparison, yet with little time for visiting
face-to-face, eye-to-eye. We have become immune

to the violence next door, alive in cyberspace, and
deaf to war—the clash of sword-on-shield or bigger
better guns barking how to cull the herd—with ease,

we have evolved to envy dumb animals and birds
in touch with the sky, yearning for ignorance
and bliss. And all the old values now lost to youth.