Valley to Valley to Valley: Back on the Ranch

My two week vacation back home to the valley of my childhood was delightful and rejuvenating but busy. Many social engagements kept me active through out the holidays. It was good to see the ol' Blue Ridge and Alleghenies though I never made it out to see them up close they were comforting from afar. I did reflect on how small and less obtrusive they are than the Sangre de Cristos, which rise up to 14,000 ft, but the valley floor here is flat unlike the Shenandoah's rolling hills. Plus there are trees to obscure the blue sky and vistas in Virginia.

I've been back for a number of days and have at last settled into the daily grind. The cows are grazing away along the Rio Grande still. The temperature at the ranch and down by the river have been in the negative twenties at night, but warm up to the single digits by the afternoon. The past few days have warmed up for us and we hit 34 degrees this afternoon, sweltering! After this current storm front passes through we'll experience a nose dive in temperatures. This weekend the cows might experience -40 and up here at the ranch possibly -30, mmm chilly. Why again am I here?

Interestingly there is a disparity between weather stations about how cold it is really suppose to be this weekend. NOAA reports -30 for Alamosa, CO, while Weather Underground is reporting -42 for Saturday night. I understand that Weather Underground uses different climatic models than NOAA. We have found NOAA predictions for rain/snow this year to be off ~80 percent of the time. I do not check Weather Underground, unless someone directs me there so I have no idea how accurate they have been at predicting our precipitation this past year. I'll let you know who was closer next week.

Cows cows cows, they are doing alright with the cold. They are grazing through about 6-8 inches of snow right now and the forage underneath the snow is standing forage. The ranch they are on right now has cut hay meadows also available to graze, but with the amount of snow on top of the 3-4 inch stubble doesn't provide enough energy for the cows to stay warm, so we have excluded these pastures from them so they do not waste their energy on forage that will not fill them up.

Our yearlings and calves moved in late December to a circle (farm field that is irrigated with a center pivot sprinkler) with windrowed sorghum (30 acres of sorghum or a quarter of a circle). The windrowed feed provides them with enough energy to maintain their health and a little extra to keep putting on the pounds that we need to finish these animals for market. We work with an organic potato/alfalfa farmer who uses sorghum as part of his farm's crop rotation. He gets the benefit of manure and urine and we receive beneficial pounds of live weight that assist us in producing beef on a timely schedule.

Fun fact of the day: A cow (1000 lbs) produces, on average, 60 lbs of manure and 6-8 gallons of urine in a day. Thank goodness for dung beetles and microbes who digest these nutrients and make them available for other life forms.

So life back on the ranch is good. Sadly my apprentice year is coming to an end soon, but in the mean time I'll limit my thoughts to the days ahead and figure out what's next in the evenings or early mornings.