Slick -Neat, string tie, clean shirt wants you to know what a good manager he is and to sell you some Porterhouse steaks.
Slack - dirtier cowboy look, stringy hair. Is likely to say "Aw, we can get to that tomorrow." More attuned to the nature of cattle and inclined to sing to them.
At this time of year it seems like life is dominated by cows. Much of the year they are there and we work with them and for them, but daily contact is brief and routine . When they are on pasture, there are days on end that we view them from afar. Opening gates and rotating them through pastures takes minutes per week instead of hours per day. Certainly there is much more work involved throughout the year - fencing, planting, harvesting hay - but calving season is when we are in close daily contact. We turn the bull in with the brood cow herd the first of June and expect calving to begin the second week of March. We used to turn him in on the 4th of July, giving us April calves, but in recent years April weather has been as unpredictable as March. We figure an extra month of milk and grass before weaning in November is worth the effort.
So now we are in the thick of it. A calf was born last night in the barn when we weren't looking and another calf plopped out in the paddock this morning when we were. It was snowing. A vulture was roosting on yesterday's placenta nearby. Remember those old westerns with the vultures circling, usually some cowboy or Indian dead or dying in the desert? Well, we have them here. Resident vultures actually, though they head south in the winter. Their nightly roost tree is on the adjoining camp property. They return to the neighborhood every March right on time for fresh road kill and placenta. It's not as good as Hinkley, Ohio, but it beats circling the landfill in Coopersville.
So now you see how it is - Slick was talking about calves and Slack interrupts and starts talking about vultures.
Anyway, today we had another mini roundup. Last night I shut the barnyard gate and this morning we moved the cows out, trimmed and tagged the calves, let them back out with their hay-eating mothers, and then cornered an unbred heifer. We attempted to load her but after she lifted the gate and ran back with the herd, we left her for another day. The new mother was now up and cleaned off the calf. Time for lunch.
We had four others in the north barn to load for the butcher and they loaded very easily. Before driving to the butcher the newborn needed to be checked. Mom was now laying down but the calf was up and bumping around so I climbed the fence and rousted the cow and within minutes the calf was nursing. That's good. We like to make sure they find the right end of the cow within a couple hours of being born, especially when the weather is bad.
Time to hit the road. It is a 100 mile drive to Ebel's Meats in Falmouth. The service is great and they have the required USDA stamp. That is still a long way to go, and because picking it up requires another round trip, it's 400 miles total. Ah, the ironies of local food. More petrol spent to insure your "safety". At least it didn't come from Kansas.
Enough "Cow Talk". Time for bed.
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