by Carissa
Republic County WIFE

December 1, 2001
Horse Creek Ranch

Today is unseasonably warm – near 70 degrees instead of in the 30’s.  So I’m off to check the fence lines, livestock, pond levels, condition of the grass and other jobs that require walking. 

There was a story in the news about an economist claiming farmers should get a second job since mechanization of farm machinery has reduced labor by 95%.  Easy for an economist working for the government or a university to proclaim farmers as having too much extra time.  Economists receive a steady salary, vacation time, sick leave, insurance benefits and retirement benefits.  Such niceties are taken for granted by many, but not by farmers and ranchers. 

Mechanization of farm machinery is just one aspect of agriculture production.  We can till far more acres of fields in the time it once took by draft animal or small tractor.  But there are many other on-farm jobs to handle.  Input costs keep rising, meaning we must make more money off the same amount of product.  Today, it is difficult to market one’s crops at a profit because more nations are competing against USA producers.  We must seek non-traditional markets in order to recoup expenses in growing our commodities.  Marketing and management of farm businesses takes a great deal of time.

Then there are the jobs that aren’t mechanized.  In some places, a pickup truck, horse or three-wheeler may be used to check fences.  But Greg and I have no horses, no ATV and there are parts of our Flint Hills rangeland not accessible by pickup.  So we often check the fences on foot, inspecting posts and wire.  Old barbed wire can become loose or break, allowing livestock to escape.  We have several animals that can find a weak spot and then push until they are on the other side.  Posts made of hedge (Osage orange) can last thirty years, but eventually become too weak for the job.  Some of our fences are fifty years old.  We make repairs until the fences can be replaced.  At over $1 per foot, it takes a lot of money to replace fences.

Today I am also looking at cattle to decide which animals will be moved to new pasture.  Since our land is not contiguous, we have names for each pasture.  I am at the Home Place this morning.  Obviously, the house is located here.  This was our first land purchase along with the acreage across the road – the North Pasture.  Then we bought the West Pasture located one mile down the road.  We used to walk the cattle to and from these pastures.   Now it is too difficult to keep them together since several farmers raise crops and haven’t maintained their fences.  Cattle don’t care about property lines.  The West Pasture has new fence and a new drilled well.  There are no electrical lines, so we will install a combination solar panel, wind generator system to pump water.  There is a pond here too.  We dredged it a few years back during a drought.  It isn’t deep though, so we needed extra water for winter. 

The Home Place is a combination of pasture, woods and crop ground.  A creek runs around the fields, meandering back and forth.  The bank next to the neighbor’s property is tree-lined.  Beavers have cut several trees down and chewed several more.  We like to keep trees, certain brush and grasses in filter strips along the waters’ edge to prevent erosion.   There is a lot of fence back in here that will need to be replaced.  Cattle can be let into the fields to graze or kept in the pastureland.  There are wild turkeys, deer, coyotes and red fox in the woods.  I removed a deadfall tree from the far fence and repositioned the wires.  I also mark where poison ivy grows.  It will have to be eradicated.  Like many vines, plants grow up fences and trees, causing damage.  There are other invasive plants we control because they can eventually overtake good grassland.  Fall and winter are good times to inspect, making notes for specific jobs and setting up timelines.  We have both short-term and long-term work schedules. 

I dawdle a bit.  It’s just so beautiful today.  A real pleasure to walk in fresh air, smell the earth, listen to the animals.  I always look over the cattle.  Sometimes they need treatment for eye problems.  Grazing over grasses, animals sometimes scratch their eyes.  When this happens, they get a shot to prevent infection and loss of sight.  I also inspect for parasites, which irritate the animals and can cause weight loss.  The weather is glorious today, but winter cold and wet are hard on animals.  They need enough energy to keep themselves warm.  If they are not healthy going into winter, they are not going to do well.  Their health is my responsibility.

I also check the feed supplement tubs of grain, molasses and other goodies.  Tubs are placed around the pasture for self-feeding where cattle lick the nutrients.  Round feed bunks hold hay.  Greg uses the tractor for placing large round bales in these feeders.  Highland cattle have long horns, so the feeders are designed with this in mind.  Other types of feeders only allow a small portion of an animal’s head through the bars.  After checking all the fences, I criss-cross the land looking at livestock and plants. 

The Nixon Pasture (named after the old school house) is next on my list.  This fence is the worst.  Cattle got out again.  We’ll take the Red Angus cattle off the Kansas City Quarter (our most easterly land) and switch animals from the Nixon.  Then we can replace fence, fill some areas of erosion, dredge the small pond, and cut brush out.  Somebody has come by and taken our fence grabber.  That’s a contraption made of metal chained around a post with a loop to go around the gate.  Ranchers too often use a barbed wire loop.  Gates of wire and posts must be tight across the opening to any pasture or field.  Getting loops off and on can be difficult.  Gate grabbers were designed to use leverage.  Once looped around the post, a lever is pulled back until it locks shut.  These cost around $30.  A loop of wire may cost 3 cents.  Gate grabbers are easy to use and take less time to open and close gates.  We have a few extras in the shop, but it is  disappointing that someone would steal our property and leave the gate open for cattle to escape.   Sometimes people cut the fence wires.  Replacing gate wires is much easier than replacing wire along a length of fence.  Once cut, that spot will always be weak. 

There are prairie chickens in this pasture and the Kansas City Quarter.  Mostly grass, crop ground on the neighbor’s land, and water.  Not much traffic along these roads.  Just one house a quarter mile over.  Greg and some friends brought the portable corrals over earlier.  Extruded grain cubes will be placed in the corrals to get the animals used to them before we actually round cattle up.   Sometimes animals are easy to herd, but usually not.   We will have to make three trips unless one of the neighbors loans a larger trailer.  Once animals are moved to the other pasture, we can rebuild this fence if the weather holds out.  No one wants to build fence after the ground freezes.  No one wants to sink posts in limestone either, but in some places post holes must be drilled out of the stone.   The folks who have been placing our new road signs up have run into this problem.  Most areas only require digging down several feet in soil.  Where rock was encountered, the sign posts installed too shallow have already fallen over.  One of our stop signs has a post about three feet high now since it has been knocked down several times by the road grader.  County workers just stick it back in the ground.  This sign is located across the road from Curtis’s mailbox  which has suffered a similar fate.  Some kids came by one year and shot holes in the mailbox.  Curtis wired some tin sheeting over the holes. But later, the post got knocked a bit and the mailbox just isn’t what it used to be.  Probably installed in the thirty’s, it may not be much to look at, but still does its job. 

I have walked for hours today.  Greg and I will discuss chores over dinner (I came from St. Louis so dinner is the evening meal for us).  Weather is always a factor for us.  So even when we lay put plans, they often must be changed due to weather conditions.  We have daily chores, others by the week or month.  There are jobs done seasonally and others done on occasion.  The evening is often spent on bookkeeping since the government wants to know how much money we make and how much we spend.   It is also the time for reading.  With a global economy, there are so many resources to follow if we are to know what our competitors are doing or what the latest technology is bringing.  We also have to contact our Congressmen about proposed legislation.  This is frustrating and time-consuming.  Those guys just love changing things around so we have to keep on our toes.  We revise how we run our business according to legislative changes in addition to our personal goals. 

I love living in the Flint Hills.  Sometimes life is very hard, other times it’s easy.  Tonight brought an interesting occurrence.  Space trash fell through the sky.  Unless we have a cloudy night (as happened during the Leonid meteor shower), we observe planets and millions of stars.  At first I thought there was a military plane with a long after-burn, but suddenly it disappeared.   Then about a dozen streaks of light traveling in unison moved across the sky from the southwest to the northeast.   One burst brighter, then fell dark.  The remaining burned for several minutes across our view.  We recalled seeing part of a Soviet space craft burning through our atmosphere as brightly.  And we watched Halley’s Comet through the telescope once used by Clyde Thombaugh (discoverer of Pluto) and Hale-Bopp Comet and an asteroid hitting Jupiter.

If we took a job in town, these are some of the wonders of the world we might not see.