From the Barns: Mother has gone home

I do my best work early in the morning before I get wrapped up in the events of the day and worn out from the same. I enjoy seeing the sun slowly lighten up the woods we live in and especially now that the fall colors are on full display. The warm fall weather has given way to what must be winter this morning with the thermometer reading down in the lower 20s. We had heeded the forecast last week and double-checked antifreeze in all the motorized pieces around the ranch and Brett wisely cracked all the weeps on watering tanks yesterday before the first overnight drop into the danger zone. Better safe than sorry. One time of an all-day tank thawing adventure is a memory no one wants to repeat.

Our pastures have been done for quite some time and stockpiled fescue and cornstalks are about history, as well. It’s a great thing that the corn crop and silage yield was so good because we are feeding a lot, much earlier in the season than we had planned for. Fall-seeded wheat will offer no help since we continue to receive no rain. Maybe it will sprout and be around to graze next spring if we get adequate overwinter precipitation.

The guys have already been through nearly all of the cow groups getting calves revaccinated. Seems early, but we have needed to treat too many calves out on pasture for pneumonia so revaccinating seems like a better alternative. Most of my time has been devoted to pumping manure and readying fields for next year’s crop — an easy, but time-consuming project — but freeze-up is out there on the horizon somewhere, so I best keep at it.

The fat market has slid a little bit due to rumors of the government meddling in an industry that doesn’t want their help. “The Board” reacts in a knee-jerk and always negative fashion to any potential rumor anywhere in the world, giving the packers an excuse to lower bids on live cattle. There’s no relative or fundamental change in the beef supply, but any rumor is all the excuse necessary to cost real producers hundreds of dollars per head, taking the cash out of the pocket of the guy raising the cattle and moving it to the packer pockets, an overnight occurrence that takes weeks to rectify.

It has been my practice to call my mom every Sunday when we get home from feeding the cattle. Since she has declared herself “retired,” she told me she no longer needed to get up at o’dark-thirty and I should refrain from calling her until a little after the sun was up, thus the post cattle feeding ritual. Nate and I fed yesterday and got home at the appointed hour, but I remembered I didn’t get to call her anymore since she decided she was ready to go be with Jesus and left us for a better, pain-free place.

She must have had a special relationship with our Lord because when she decided she had fought long enough he swept her up and took her home. I will miss our chats. She loved to be brought up to speed on what all we were up to, down on the ranch and what her grands were up to. At 92, she had outlived all her siblings and all her classmates, but her passing has left a big hole to fill in all the love she poured into all the friends and family that were lucky enough to know her.