Harvest of 2019

I don’t get much time to write these days. To all of my commitments, I keep telling people, “when the snow’s on the ground, I’ll have more time.” Summer is good. Work is good. Cows are good. But I’m looking forward to the hibernating season. I wish people would throw lake parties and bonfires in the winter; then I could emerge from my hermitage more. Maybe.

I’ve forced my own hand in starting this post, because we’re on our way to look at bulls and I made a point of not bringing a book (that’s right, I didn’t just forget one). So either I will get some words down here on my iPod, or I’ll just play a lot of cribbage.

My last post kind of covered calving season, which wrapped up at the beginning of July, and the pace just got crazier from there.

All during calving season, we’re kind of shackled to the cows. The first-calf heifers needed frequent checking, as they’re new to the whole ordeal, and the main herd got checked every other day or so. It’s definitely easier than calving in the January-April time frame, as the cows are out on grass just doing their thing, but it still prevents us from getting started on other projects.

One particular project that’s been looming over us is the fencing of some new land that we purchased. We were able to get up there here and there to take the old fence down, but putting the new one up takes a lot more planning and commitment. We started on it when my brother and his family were out. They, along with my sister and myself, all purchased a quarter section each of this package of land. We are working it out with some cows for them, and my own herd, and land rent, and calf cheque’s, and sweat equity, and it’s all very confusing. I have a work book with equations all penciled out for how to manage it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s been a major contributing factor in losing both weight (yay!) and sleep (not yay). It’s particularly troubling that they are in Big City, somehow getting better returns on their cattle than I seem to be.

But I guess I get to be living the dream.

Also, one of their calves was born with a hair lip, so I’m thinking God still loves me best.

Anyway, they came out for a two-week visit in July and we got to work putting their fences up.

Fencing would be pretty okay if a person didn’t have to do all the speculating.

We put Brother in the loader of the tractor and lifted it as high as it would go, then he was our speculator; our straight-line-lookout for us to put posts every couple hundred feet so we had guides to make the fence straight. There’s so much back and forth, and straightening wires, and levelling posts, and tilting heads, and squinting eyes, and trying to communicate on radios that don’t work. When the guide posts are finally straight and a wire has been rolled out to rest perfectly in line with them, then the work can start.

First, we go with the old blue truck, heavily laden with a bundle of posts, and set out posts along the wire. Dad steps them out because his legs are scientifically the precisely correct length to place six exact, deliberate strides between posts. Except when there’s a slight dip. Or a slight hill. Or a rock. Or a hole. Then he uses his less-scientific (but still pretty scientific) estimation, as well as goes back and forth a few times to get even spacing and optimize aesthetics. It’s a real art.

Once we get the posts laid out appropriately (very appropriately),

Two people can get started with the post pounder while other people begin whatever work can be done. Sometimes that’s straightening the next stretch of fence (we do half-mile stretches at a time), stringing wire, or stapling.

When brother was around, I would drive the tractor and he would pound posts. He got markedly better at his job as he progressed, as the state of his fenceposts attests to. He and Dad may cringe at the wobbly fence line, but I think it tells the story of a developing skill.

When Brother’s crew packed up and left us, we were down to the skeleton crew again.

When we get going, our system is pretty efficient. Mom and Dad get a start pounding posts, then we do an intricate leapfrog. First, I string the wires until I’ve caught up to where they’ve pounded posts. Using four out of eight wire stretchers (or seven if we forget one in another truck), I tighten the four wires up to different posts. Leaving them there, I take my pail of staples, a hammer, and the jig that we made (a skinny post with four staples to mark where the wires should go) and I start stapling.

The jig scientifically marks the precisely correct spacing between staples. We literally researched online what size spacing a four-wire fence should have; that’s how scientific this is. The jig is great. I love the jig. It is so much better than remembering which rip or grease mark on my clothes to put the wire at until I develop a bruise in that place that I can use. I just pop the wires onto the jig’s staples and the wire will be in the exact prime location. Except when there’s a slight dip. Or a slight hill. Or a rock. Or a hole. Then less-scientific estimation is once again needed to optimize fence aesthetics. The goal is to get the wire even-looking, so it doesn’t look like it zigs and zags up and down. It has nothing to do with cattle containment, and everything to do with personal satisfaction. Personal satisfaction is a term which, here, mostly means Dad’s satisfaction.

Anyway, by the time I get that stretch stapled, Mom and Dad walk back to string some more wire out. At the next stretching point, they use the remaining stretchers to tighten the next section of fence for me to keep stapling. If the posts are going in harder and I have a fresh arm, I can actually keep up to them. I’m kind of a big deal. And I’m super strong.

Once we have guide posts in and corners made, it takes us only several hours to do all the leg work on a half mile. We’re pretty great at it; it would be a good fall back if the cattle thing went bust. But we’d have to fall back pretty hard to resort to fencing for other people.

We have to complete the half mile if we’ve already set posts out, as Dad is afraid that someone will drive along and steal the posts if we don’t. That may seem paranoid, but he’s heard of it happening before. I was thinking he was being extra cautious, too, but it turns out that someone helped them self to the PTO shaft on the rock picker that we use to roll old wire up. If you’re out there, PTO thief, and you thought you were just salvaging something from an old wreck in the bush (understandable; that’s what it looks like, and it was in the bush), then you could just go put it back. It doesn’t really matter, now, because we made a new one, but you would make my father less irritated about it.

Anyway, after every fencing day, we have to pack it all up and leave it across from the yard site that’s up there to discourage the freeloaders.

So yeah, that’s the fencing aspect of my life. Since we got some rain around here, there’s going to be enough grazing for the herd without that piece of land, but we’d still like to get it fenced and ready for next year. We currently have 2.5/6 miles done. For those of you who are bad at math, namely Sister, that’s less than half, which means an approximate butt-load remains (a scientific butt-load, to be exact).

Recently, fencing has been ousted back onto the back burner in lieu of haying season finally coming around. It’s not every year that a person cuts hay in August, nor should it be. It’s really nice quality stuff, though; since the rain came so late, the grass wasn’t even mature. We spent two weeks cutting and baling, and now we’re on another round of cutting and baling. It’s looking like it’ll take us into September to get it baled, so when I’m fifty years old, I’m going to use this year, 2019, to compare every other late baling experience.

“It’s the end of July and we still haven’t got everything baled!” The future generations will complain.

“That’s nothing,” I’ll say, putting down my Farmer’s Almanac and straightening my coke-bottle glasses. “Back in nineteen, we didn’t get the hay up until September.”

This isn’t even hyperbole (not that I use hyperbole - every word I say is unexaggerated, 100% not-from-concentrate fact); every spring, Dad reminds us that... “It’s pretty dry. Could be disastrously dry. Might be the start of a ten-year drought, like in the good old days. We’re due for a drought. I remember one year, I had the corrals pushed out at the beginning of April. Everything cleaned up by the first of April. It was so dry. Dry, dry, dry. Could be like that again.”

So far, all I have in my repertoire of weather wisdom is the March snow storm of thirteen (“It all came in a day! Drifts that went clean over the old Massey tractor!”) and now this September baling.

Maybe someday I’ll push poop in April like my father before me.

Aside from the future reminiscing I can do about the haying, it’s a pretty mundane activity. I have two clear stations that I can get on the radio. One plays the same top country hits every day, and the other plays the same top non-country hits every day. Often times, these stations break up the music with outrageous sound effects that make me jam on the brakes because it sounds like my machinery is blowing up. When my heart becomes strained, I just turn it off and listen to the rhythmic ticking of mole hills sweeping through the haybine like the errant thoughts that sweep through my brain.

In the hay-making process, I far prefer baling to cutting. Cutting the hay requires an awkward, twisted position to be maintained as one watches the haybine over the right shoulder. When one is paranoid of breakdowns, as one would be if one was me, which I am, then one keeps a constant watch on the machine’s movements. Constant vigilance doesn’t seem to outweigh my natural inabilities, though. Sometimes as I watch, I think, “Huh. That’s neat. The way the reels are turning makes it look like the grass isn’t even moving through.” Since my hair is blonde right down to the roots, it takes me a few seconds to realize that what I am observing is the machine plugging up. This delayed reacting is just another constant of haying that I have to learn to live with, much like rocks and wet mole hills.

Baling is much simpler and more relaxing, since I have a monitor right in front of me that tells me what to do and when things are going wrong. This monitor is the bomb. It tells me if my bale is uneven, how big it is, gives me a warning before it ties, then tells me it’s tying, and shows me when the baler’s open or closed. If something goes wrong, it lets off an ungodly wailing and shows a code for the thing that went wrong (the code book is tucked conveniently in the back of the monitor).

Of course, despite all this, I still compulsively glance over my shoulder to check that things are turning. This isn’t just a residue reaction from the haybine, either. It’s a residue reaction from a treacherous tractor. Several years ago, Dad bought a lemon of a John Deere that had some electrical problem. Every once in a while, the PTO would just stop. No warnings would sound, because the tractor and monitor just thought the PTO had been switched off. The first time this tractor did this, I was baling. I had made about a half a bale’s worth before I began to get suspicious, as my bale monitor was not showing me my bale size (the diameter of the bale only shows up after the bale hits 22 inches). Unfortunately, I didn’t just drive all that way and not pick up the swath. The baler teeth had actually been grabbing the hay as I motored along. But it wasn’t feeding into the baler; just packing in beneath it. I was baling with Brother at the time, so I just stopped there, shut everything off, and waited for him to fix my problems. He got the tractor backed off the enormous swath, then we spread it out some so that his baler could pick it up. He checked my machine over, but couldn’t find anything wrong, so we went again. I was a lot more watchful after that, and still am. Thankfully, we got rid of that tractor, but at first, no one believed me that the PTO just quit.

“You must have bumped it.”

“There must have been some sort of warning triggered, and you just missed it.”

It wasn’t until Dad drove it that he realized the tractor was, indeed, the lemon; not me. Eventually he decided that the tractor must have been struck by lightning. Lighting is what we typically blame when stuff inexplicable goes wrong with something. Mostly, it’s the suspect of unexplained cattle deaths and internet slowness, but sometimes it gets blamed for vehicle malfunctions, too.

We’re not using net wrap on the bales this year; just twine. Twine takes a little longer to wrap on the bale, but it comes down the front of the baler, so I can see with my own two eyes that it’s working. When we net wrap the bales, we have to trust in the monitor to tell us when something’s gone wrong, which it always seems to. You just can’t trust net wrap.

Baling rarely requires a person to leave their tractor (except to test bales), but I did managed to plug mine up this year.

There was a patch of really wet weeds by a bush that I was going to wrap up with some of the foxtail that I was baling just to get it off the field. The first time around, I was making good bales when I saw that it looked wet, so I turned the tractor sharply off the swath to leave it out. I guess the angle was bad or something, because my handy-dandy bale monitor began to wail at me. It was screaming, “Stop! Nothing is turning around anymore!” That’s not verbatim, but it’s pretty close.

Anyway, the wet sowthistle and hawksbeard had jammed the pick-up right full, which is what stopped everything from turning.

I just had a little bit of hay in the machine and I figured it was mostly wet anyway, so I kicked it out and opened the baler up. I shut everything down and applied the appropriate locks (safety first, kids), then set to work pulling the raggy, wet stuff out.

I was able to get it cleaned out and going in good time, a measurement of time which, here, means ‘before Dad came looking for me.’ Because I was in such a hurry to get going again, I cut up my hands on the prickly weeds. I wasn’t wearing gloves because I thought that I forgot to put gloves in the tractor, but really I just forgot that I didn’t forget to put gloves in the tractor.

Anyway, crises averted for the time being, we finished up in the field, and then Dad sent me off to bale up the foxtail patches.

Round two.

I still wanted to bale up the weeds to get rid of them, so I figured I’d just hit the swath straight and go slower. I don’t really know what happened, but I think that trying to do those two things as well as not drive into the bush was just too high-pressure for me.

Straight up, I panicked.

Instead of completing the three tasks of driving straight on to the swath, slowing down, and not hitting the bush, I just barely managed to turn in time to not hit the bush. The fear of plugging the machine must have gotten into my head and caused me to plug the machine. Darn self-fulfilling prophecies.

Anyway, once again I had to scrabble and scratch and pull at the wet, prickly weeds to try and get them out in good time. Once again, I forgot that I didn’t forget to bring my gloves.

I eventually did finish up that piece, but there’s a small patch of weeds left by that one bush.

And also two bits of bale cores.

And also some of my skin.

We invested in a rake this year, after years of supposing that rakes were a waste of money. It was a good choice, as the weather was constantly threatening to cut our days short. With the new implement, Dad went out in the morning to rake two swaths together. By noon-ish, the hay was testing dry and Mom and I could sweep along the double swath, making half as many miles with the balers as we otherwise would have.

We were quite the crew out there, Mom and I with the two nice big tractors and balers, and Dad, dish towel tucked into his hat to shade his neck, chugging around with the little old open-air John Deere 3020, rattling rake in tow.

At this point in time, this article of writing being a work-in-progress, the haying is long done. It took us into September and involved some fist-shaking at the little spotty showers that seemed to just hit the swaths.

Nowadays, there are still a lot of farmers shaking their fists at the sky. As of the end of September, the provincial crop report stated that only 39% of the crop was harvested, and I’m pretty sure it’s even worse in our particular area. This whole year has been a roller coaster of weather-induced emotions for farmers and ranchers. First, there was no rain until mid-July and the crops and grass looked beyond hope. When it started raining, things began to look up, and when it kept raining we could hardly believe how well things recovered. There wasn’t a lot of hay, but enough to get us through, and though the crops weren’t record-breaking, they seemed to catch up to an average.

Now, the farmers are in straights again. The peas are off, and some of the wheat, but the weather has gotten cold and gives us more overcast days than sunny.

It’s just one of those tough years that Dad has been predicting for several years now (he tends to use a shotgun method for his predictions).

Being that we don’t have crops to contend with, this time of year is generally spent in a different kind of harvest for us. Mom gathers in the excessive amount of potatoes that she planted, stockpiles far too many pumpkins, shows off the one zucchini she left on the vine to see how big it could get, puts tomatoes in boxes and carrots in bags, and researches different ways to preserve beets.

Dad starts shopping on kijiji for the cheapest winter feed options, which has lately been oats, and we stockpile that for the cold months.

Then the cattle need to be gathered up and conglomerated into their fall pasture. 37 pair from the south-east, 70 pair from the south, 48 from the east, and 116 from the north. 65 pair and 79 heifers stay close to home.

The poor, out-of-shape horses made upwards of 20 miles in the three days of moving cows around. Dad took the less-experienced Bill out for one of the long days, and asked his opinion on the hard day’s work as he pulled the saddle off:

“So, Bill, how was that? Better than being eaten? Or would you rather just be eaten and have it over with?”

It does make you wonder.

Regardless of how Bill feels, it’s nice to see the herd content in their quarters until it’s time to bring them home for the winter.

Normally, we would be focusing on getting things ready for winter. We’d be hauling bales, checking fences, cutting twine off of bale-grazing bales, and moving equipment around.

But not just yet.

Because remember the approximate butt-load of fencing left to do?

What was an ‘oh, we have all summer to build those 6 miles of fence’ kind of project has turned into an ‘uh oh, we have approximately not that much time to do this before it gets cold’.

Now that this article, like the fencing, has taken us into October, it has turned into a, ‘oh, well. Bundle up; we’re doing this in the cold’ project.

So that’s what we do.

Currently (which is a very loose term in my writing, since I’ve been writing this since August), we have 4.5 miles done! We definitely want to get another half-ish mile done to get finished up to the creek, but the remaining mile could be left until the Spring; it still has old fence that needs to be rolled up. Before we pack up and take all the equipment home, though, we’ll have to get some corners in along the cross-fences and get those patched up so they’re ready to hold cattle in the spring.

Sometimes, when I go to bed at night, my arm jumps to hammer in a phantom staple. I’ve done all the stapling on 3 miles, and half the stapling on the other 1.5 miles, so let’s do some math...

4 staples per post * 600 posts per mile * 3.75 miles = 9000 staples pounded.

Sometimes people ask us if we dream of fencing when the day is done.

Yes, I genuinely do.

We don’t exactly have time for recreation, especially this year, with all the fencing, but one entertaining pastime we always seem to take a few days off for is helping out in the community pasture. No matter how many riders they get to help with rounding up, there are not enough riders. We were around for two of the days they scheduled for round-up, and each of those days, there were six riders. Six horse and rider pairs to cover miles and miles of native prairie hills and bushes. Six riders to try and bring in hundreds of cow-calf pairs that know their way around better than the people do.

It’s always kind of a gong show, but the pasture is unbelievably beautiful, and when you get up into the rolling hills and look around, all you can see for miles is native grasslands. The whole pasture is 82 quarter-sections, but 10 of those are the lake, so 72 quarters. 72*160 = 11,520 acres. Of course, it’s fenced into four different pastures, so we weren’t riding the whole chunk at once, but the North Pasture we rode probably represents about a third of that, or more. So, yeah. It’s big.

Anyway, back to the gong show.

The problem with rounding up there is that there’s around ten different herds in the pasture. Cows are pretty cliquey, so usually all the cows that belong to a producer will hang together-ish. The first day we went out, we got in two of the notoriously difficult herds from this pasture. When I say difficult, I mean that even though you may find the group of cows hanging together, as soon as you go to move them out, they split off and run for it.

Divide and conquer. And they know what they’re about.

Three will go left, five will go right, then when you get around the three, they will split off into different directions again; meanwhile, the five are a mile away and have heard someone coming so have split off in five more directions. By the time you get to them, each pair will be another mile apart from when they re-split. They don’t care which direction they go in, as long as it’s not where you want them to go. They’re sneaky, too. If you get a couple people moving a group, they know you won’t be so hard to beat, so they look like they trail out all nicely, but you’ll look back and one pair will be stopped in a little dip, listening for anyone coming and deciding which way they’re going to run. Or, they’ll just be going along nicely and one miserable old coot will take her calf and dive into the nearest bush.

With all of us working on those two difficult herds, things actually went pretty well. We got them along the lake, then up to the fence line, then into the holding field, an 80-ish-acre paddock that leads to the corrals. At that point, I ran back out to stop a black pair that we’d missed. I got her stopped up by another gate to the holding field and waited for backup. Unfortunately, backup was having trouble with the rest of the herd, and as I waited, a few pairs trickled back to my corner, having been successful in splitting off from the herd. Eventually, the riders got the main herd into the corrals and came back for the stragglers. We got my cow in, then three of us started bringing up the little group of stragglers. I was bringing up the rear, so when three split off and tucked around a bush, I didn’t see until it was too late. Two of us got two of them in, but the third one was a cow that already had a black spot to her name, so we thought we’d leave her to hopefully wander in, rather than rope her.

Anyway, I won’t go into such detail on what went on the second day. Dad ran poor Bill ragged trying to gather the scattering cows, since most of the cattle in there are difficult, even though we took two bad herds out. There was a mildly confusing plan of action that left Dad trying to gather in the middle section, where all of the difficultest of the difficult cows were.

Things were running and scattering and stopping and diving; it was all very confusing, but we ended up getting most of the cows out, which is a minor miracle, really.

In any case, as bad as Dad and Bill had it, I was in a situation that was worse.

The plan at the start was that Dad and his dog would ride out and start gathering the close cows, and the other five of us would trailer out and start on the far end. Somehow, I ended up in the van with the three Indigenous guys, while the guy named McScotland (not really, but pretty close) drove the horse trailer down (P.S. I’m sorry if I’m not using the politically correct terminology here; I'm honestly trying. Should I have just called him Caucasion, rather than McScotland??).

Anyways, as soon as the doors slammed on the big white van, the three comrades started chattering away in Cree and laughing. I had my suspicions, being the lone white girl in the big white van, but I just sat quietly in the passenger seat, contemplating the fact that my father had seen me into the very situation that he’d warned me against when Sister and I went travelling in Europe.

Aside from appreciating the irony, I was trying to gather up all of the Cree words I could remember to see if I could catch anything they were saying. All I know is that they weren’t using the numbers 1-10, or talking about dogs, horses, pigs, or rabbits.

Anyway, when we were out of the van and onto the horses, the pasture manager, who knows me by dint of knowing my dad, turned to me and told me, “The boys like to talk Cree, but don’t worry, they weren’t talking about you.”

This was somewhat reassuring, and slightly eased my discomfort. Unfortunately, he followed up with, “They were talking about much older, uglier women.”

And I was back to being uncomfortable.

I have resolved to learn a phrase in Cree for just such a situation, though, so that, in the future, I can leave the big white van with a saucy Cree quip, leaving them to think I understood every word.

Anyway, after that, we were all busy trying to chase our tails in the round-up, so we didn’t see or hear much of anyone except the occasional horse and rider flying over a hill, whooping and hollering futilely, trying to get their cows headed in a better direction.

Now all that’s left is to gather in the strays from the different pastures. The ones that are left behind are usually the really, really bad ones, so that’s always entertaining.

Well, I think it’s time I finally ended this update. My insatiable fans are going to start complaining soon if I don’t get this up, so for the sake of my grandmas, it’ll have to end here, even though it didn’t see us through to the exciting conclusion of our harvests of fencing, bale-hauling, or round-up.

Quite the cliff hangers. You'll have to stay tuned for the next three-month update.