Wyoming Heifers (Part 1)

The end of September and the month of October are among the busiest times on the ranch. We spend countless hours on horseback gathering our cows together to be brought home from their summer pasture to where they will be spending the winter months. And today is the very start of that. Most of our cows pasture on national forest land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which are called forest service permits. But our replacement heifers spend the summer across the border on some private land in Wyoming. Today we are working on moving the heifers from one pasture to another where they will be spending the next three weeks grazing until they are ready to be brought home. Today I will be riding our horse Trump who got the name because he looks like Trump and he has a weakness for the ladies. My dad will be riding our horse Jerk and my mom will be tagging along with a four-wheeler. This should be a relatively easy day but you never know what will happen when working with heifers. All right we just got out here to our pasture in Wyoming. It's about a half hour drive. Gonna unload the horses and get going. So I'm just gonna ride down here to the water tank and make sure there's nothing down here in this drop. And if there is I'll just bring him back up on top up by the gate and we'll just gather everything around there so we can get a good count. Make sure we've got everything and aren't leaving anything behind. So today we're moving our replacement heifers. A replacement heifer is just it's a cow that she's gonna have her first calf this coming spring. She hasn't had a calf before and by replacement that just means we're gonna keep her and get rid of an older cow so it keeps our our herd younger and in better health. We have less problems with old cows. So there's about 110 of them of these replacement heifers that we're out here looking for and that we're gonna move and we'll probably be getting rid of some older cows later if we haven't got rid of them already. So mother nature must have been calling to Trump. Had to take a little pit stop and left some organic matter behind. So we got down to the water tank and there's a handful of the heifers down here getting a drink so there's more coming too. So we're just gonna let them come get a quick drink and then we're gonna bring them back up on top. Hopefully it'll go good. You hear a lot of people complain about working with heifers. They're kind of like teenagers. I mean these girls have they aren't that old they were just born let's see spring of 2020. So yeah we'll see how it goes. They look really good. They look fat. They look happy and healthy. They're all bred or most of them should be. We preg tested them earlier this summer. So most of these should be bred. So we're gonna bring them up back up on top and keep going with the day. So we've got the heifers on the move now. We're just gonna bring them back up on top and hopefully find the rest. Get them through the gate and keep on going. So we met up with my dad up on top. Looks like he's got the rest of them. So now we're just gonna bring them to the gate and get them through get a good count. So we got them through the first gate. Seems like we got a pretty good count. I just had one that didn't want to go through the gate very well but that's all right. Now we're just gonna keep going. Gotta go about a mile and we should be there. So we just got the heifers in the last gate here. It went pretty smooth. Pretty easy. Only took us about I don't know maybe an hour hour and a half. And now we're gonna go back to the pickup get some lunch and see what else is planned for today. All right we made it back to the trailer. They're gonna stay there. They're gonna have enough grass to eat until we come and round them up and get them out of here and bring them home for for the winter.