Mooooving Cattle

Drought is hitting our family hard. Our cattle have learned to crawl through nearly any and all fences and we fight to keep them in every day. We have next to no grass left near our house so it became necessary to move them.

The first thing we had to do was to get the cattle out of their current pasture and divide them up the way we wanted them. We only had four people to do the job, so to assure they went the right direction we made our version of a redneck fence leading them out of the corral. That's some nice lookin' farm equipment...um, I mean fence ;-)

To account for the horrible drought, CRP (ground enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program) has been released to allow cattle to graze on it. Ground in the CRP program is ground that land owners set aside for various reasons. It is ground that is more or less untouched during the years it is enrolled in the program. However, at this time, it is almost the only ground around that has any grass on it to graze cattle. This is what it looks like where we moved part of our cattle to. Isn't it sad that this ground looks awesome compared to where they were?

Since it hasn't been used for cattle before, we had to set up a fence. This meant literally miles of walking and stringing out wire for an electric fence. We use a home-made wire roller to roll out the wire. My dad and his brother can pretty much rig up anything...it's fun to see some of the stuff they have built over the years. In this video you hear me talking about the wire having too much slack in it. If it does have too much slack, it can actually break the wire because of the inconsistent pressure being placed on the wire while pulling it...and not too long after this video was taken, the wire did break.

To anchor the wire, dad placed wooden posts in the corner and attached the wire to it before driving the pickup to roll out the wire.

As soon as he had a section rolled out, we were in charge of placing the posts on it. The posts were 30 steps apart...so there was a lot of walking. These are the posts. They are metal posts that are driven into the ground with big hammers and then the wire goes on the plastic insulator. We would take five at a time and step them off while the person behind got to the mule and moved it to the next spot before doing the next five.

Once we got the field all fenced in, it was finally time to unload the cattle.

Sometimes it was a bit difficult to reach them. So, we improvised ;-)

You can tell that even this grass is incredibly dry. It didn't take long for the pen to become powder, as is proven by the dust.

Moving cattle to a different location creates some different challenges. One of which is a water supply. This field has no well with it, so we will be hauling water around 8 miles every day. And yes, this is our Coca Cola truck...we take what we can get ;-)

Now, we're continuing to pray for rain. We know God doesn't give us more than we can handle, and we are praying for patience to deal with this trying time. I'm also praying that all of you are dealing with the heat and drought the best that you can and maintaining a positive attitude during such a hard time.