Meanwhile…

Well, after all that celebrating… Let’s check into what’s been happening on the ranch…

Our last snowstorm dropped a nice amount of snow… between 9″-10″…  Which was great in one respect.  There was enough snow, that when you walked in it, it didn’t compress down enough to hit that layer of ice on the bottom left by the last freeze/thaw cycle.

In other words, time to work cows!

The cows receive a scour guard vaccine, a shot of mineral, and a spray on dewormer, all to get them prepared for calving season.  Scours, aka diarrhea, can be a fast killer of baby calves, and this shot helps prevent it.  The mineral is just like a shot of vitamins for you… And the dewormer is pretty self explanatory!

It’s a very fast process.  Four cows are urged up the alleyway, and Brandon and Daniel quickly give the two shots and the spray along the cows’ backs.

The cows are then sorted two ways.  Brandon corrected me on this the other day.  We *used* to separate the early calvers from the later ones, although with a two week leeway, they often had them calving at the same time.  Now we split them according to the cows’ age.

Work was interrupted by a nice lasagna meal. We returned to work and finished in good time.  Then the cows were trailed to their different pastures to eat and lay around until calving season!