Meat Crisis

 Crown H Cattle Company was recently in the middle of a meat crisis.  We've read about the loaded cargo ships, circling around ports, unable to offload their containers full of Nutella and Nissans, but in reality, aside from a few gaskets I needed for my truck, the choked out supply chain hadn't affected us too much.  That is, until we butchered our first Beltie steers and realized we were in desperate need of more freezer space.

We'd intended to have Crown H Beltie beef for sale in October.  Our steers were grain-finished for 90 days and were looking fat and delicious.  Regina was grinding away at the Crown H website (crownhcattlecompany.com), and we were ready to start delivering delicious cuts of amazing beef (see: beltie.org for some cool facts about its nutritional value).  We called the butcher September to schedule a time for Frank, our local processor, to come over and were told we'd have to wait until December.  December?  Was the butcher stuck on one of those loaded cargo ships?  The Belties would be hippos by then.  Luckily, there were 2 cut and wrap places in Siskiyou county (and now, there are 3, thanks 5 Marys!) and we we called, and begged, and got our beef squeezed into the books for an October butcher date.  The next step was to pick up another freezer to hold all the beef we would be expecting.

We tried to buy a freezer locally, but the size we needed required an online purchase.  Suddenly, we were in a race to get a freezer delivered before 1000 lbs. of meat arrived at our door.  The freezer lost that race.  We'd also butchered one Hanna Bros. steer, had 5 butchered turkeys, I'd just cut and wrapped my mule deer from buck season, and had decided, on a whim, to buy a lamb; our freezer space was limited to say the least.  When I picked up the Beltie beef there were so many boxes that it took 2 trips with my truck.  We started to panic.  

Regina got on the horn and luckily our friends at Denny Bar had both a giant chest freezer used for their restaurant overflow and an extra upright that only held ice packets and some margarita mix.  We spent a late night shuffling frozen beef around the valley, stuffing it into any and all available freezers.

Luckily, Regina sold three 1/4 shares of beef (our first sales!) which gave us a little room, and
the new freezer finally arrived.  We are ready for the next round of delicious Beltie beef to come our way (check the website, it'll be soon!).  And if we aren't ready?  It's good to have friends with giant freezers.

Just Another Day

I'm going to tell you a story about what it's like being a rancher.  It's a true story and all the events I'm about to describe happened in a single day.

It started like most fall days: feeding cattle.  I started with the bulls but I immediately got the big bale feeder jammed up with hay.  Some rice straw had wrapped around one of the rows of blades and plugged it up worse than a Woodstock Porta Potty.  Normally I would take care of the problem, but I also had a vet coming to check on Dylan's fair heifer, so my brother got to work on the feed truck.  It's a tricky job, removing hay from the blades, and takes a lot of slow movements and caution.  My brother isn't known for either, but he executed the job perfectly, until he didn't.  For the second time in my life he came up to me and asked, "Will you tell me if this needs stitches?"  The first time was a run in with a chainsaw and the answer then was a resounding yes.  This time, same answer.  Luckily, the vet was still there and so he cleaned up the wound, pulled out his handy-dandy stapler and several clicks later, my brother was wrapped up in hot pink vet wrap and good to go.

You'd think that with that kind of start to the day, the rest should go a lot more smoothly.  And it did; until it didn't.  We moved a herd of cattle across the road and a few calves got away from their mothers.  Stray calves are notorious idiots, cute as they are, and will always run in the opposite direction of the cows.  One ran into the neighbors, where it got chased out by their dogs, and then ran, and ran, and ran.  The last time we saw it was in the other neighbor's barn lot.  Perfect.  We drove in on 4-wheelers to scoop it up and, poof, it was gone.  After hiking hills, scanning fence lines, and driving ditches, we gave up.  That evening, after dark, I decided to go back and look and ta-da, there it was.  Brother came down and we made a plan, which immediately blew up in our faces.  The calf ran, brother pursued, and I chased on foot.  Luckily, my brother got a rope on the calf and I wrestled

Sometimes we do stupid stuff, 
sometimes the cattle do.

it in the back of my truck.  On my way to return the runaway, brother called, which I knew couldn't be with good news.  "I rolled the 4-wheeler," he said.  By the time I got back to him he had righted the bike and was heading home but by the next morning he couldn't cough or laugh without crying.  There's really no point in seeing a doctor for broken ribs, and the vet had long since gone home, so he had to tough it out for a few days.  

1 day, 2 wrecks.  I'd say that isn't, thankfully, a typical day-in-the-life, but it wasn't surprising either.  It's not a job for everyone, but, man, it sure is fun.

Molly Moo

Sometimes, especially on a ranch, you do things a certain way because, well, you've always done them that way.  But then the neighbors try a new approach and well, you can't exactly change and copy them, because that's plagiarism, right?  But, man, it really seems like a better idea and then another neighbor starts doing it, and heck, if everyone's doing it there just might be something to it.  And that's why we bought a nurse cow.

And nurse cow is just a dairy cow that is used to raise bummer, or orphan, calves.  They're often pretty cheap, usually gentle, can raise 3-4 calves, and, best of all, those 2 or 3 a day bottle feedings I've been doing all winter long for the past 14 years?  No more.  All it took was a 3 hour drive with a trailer to meet Dale.

Dale didn't sell me a nurse cow.  Through no fault of his own, he somehow became a nurse cow middle man.  He doesn't do it for money, and he certainly doesn't do it for fame.  Dale is just a good guy.  He's a friend of a friend of a friend and is the kind of guy who always has a toothpick in his mouth and calls guys, "boss."  I drove to Dale's place and he hopped in my truck and guided me to the dairy.  In 15 minutes I had 2 cows in the trailer and was heading home.

Grafting calves onto new mothers can be a chore.  Mama cows often don't want calves that aren't their own so we do all sorts of tricks to convince them that the orphan is really theirs.  We've skinned out dead calves and had the orphan wear the hide so the nurse cow still catches a whiff of her original calf.  It's a lot like the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Anthony Hopkins wears the cop'
s face as a disguise.  Sometimes I'll pour molasses or maple syrup on the calf's back so the mother licks it and since she's licking this new calf and it tastes like candy, she might as well keep it.  Whatever we do, it's usually difficult.  Mothers will kick strange calves that are trying to nurse and it usually takes a lot of attempts in a squeeze chute to get them together.  But a dairy cow?  I put our new Jersey in a pen with 2 calves, said, "Congratulations! You just had twins!" and walked away.  In 10 minutes the 2 calves were nursing their new mommy and she was licking their backs like she'd just birthed them.  I only wish the neighbors had bought a nurse cow years ago; it would have saved me a lot of time.

Fire Starter

This summer was hot.  Miserably hot.  We were in the middle of raging wildfires, insanely high temperatures, low water reserves, and a shortage of above-ground pools at Walmart.  It was a perfect storm for a field fire.  And yet, I still thought that cutting drier than normal grain hay on a drier than normal Hartstrand field would be a good idea.  Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

To be fair (use your Letterkenny voice when you read that), A) this was the earliest I could even get to that field, B) it had a decent rain hit it 2 days prior, and C) I started cutting in the morning so it wouldn't be too hot or dry.  And mostly, things went well.

Until they didn't.  I'd cut all morning and had just one more pass to make before I was finished, but as I turned the swather around to make my final pass, I saw smoke.  Oh shit.  From that moment on, I went full Keystone Cops.  I was near Grant's house, so I spun the swather back around and raced into his driveway.  I started grabbing anything I could get my hands on that would put out a fire.  As I ran back and forth with shovels, coolers full of water, and rakes, I didn't notice that I had passed, several times, a literal pile of fire extinguishers.  I raced back out to the field on a 4-wheeler I saw the fire had expanded to the size of, say, the RV I'd soon be living in if I burned down all the homes on Hartstrand.  I dumped the cooler on the flames and extinguished 1/10th of the flames.  A young passerby in flip-flops stopped to help and tried stomping out the flames.  Bad idea.  

That's when I grabbed the fire extinguisher.  Those things are appropriately named.  Honestly, I don't think I'd ever used one before, but I've seen movies and I knew it was a lot like using a grenade (which I also have never used before).  And it worked.  I got about 90% of the fire out and the rest I smothered with my giant, broken grain shovel.  I finally breathed.

My brothers showed up with a water truck and I doused the area.  Neighbors showed up.  CalFire showed up.  I found the rock that the swather blades nicked and likely sparked the fire, so I saved it for my baby book.  I've been cutting hay for a lot of years and this was my first fire.  My dad, who also cut hay for a lot of years, started only one, but it was a big one.  Boray planes were deployed.  This one sufficiently spooked me.  I'm cutting now in a swather/fire truck.  I have shovels, fire extinguishers, piss-pumps, fire shelters, a helmet, and flashing lights.  It might be overkill, but if it happens again, I'll be ready.

Of course, I didn't have time to take a picture.  But here's a cool one of the day the smoke rolled in.

Up and Back

Cats ride for free

 For the purists, summer begins on the solstice in June, for most, it begins on Memorial Day, but for Scott Valley alfalfa growers, it begins when hay season starts.  And, more specifically, it begins when the swathers fire up and start mowing down hay.  

There is usually a span on a couple days, usually in late May, when the farmers start getting restless.  They stare at the skies, then they check, and re-check, their weather apps, waiting for the perfect window of good weather.  When the coast looks clear, they hop in their trucks and start doing laps around the valley, checking to see who was brave, or dumb, enough to start cutting.

Fortunately for me, I couldn't do any of those things this year because I was so far behind, I was still under my machine, changing the oil and prepping it for summer.  I finally got the big red machine ready to go just in time, too, because just when I put on the the last fresh cutting blade, I could hear the distinct whine of a swather motor in the neighbor's field.  And so begins the daily ritual.

Dogs do too

Someone asked me once what cutting hay is like.  You start with cutting a few rounds around the outside of a field, usually 4 but some farmers do 3, then you cut a straight line, either in the middle or along an edge, and start going up, then back.  Repeat that a million times and at some point in late September you've caught up on a year's worth of podcasts and you're done.  It's a job I started doing with my dad as a small kid.  First I'd just ride along with him, then he eventually let me take a few passes, and eventually I was on my own.  A hundred years later, I'm still at it.  Up and back, on repeat.

The Country Club

The view is ok.  I guess.

 I'm a member of a Country Club.  No, don't start humming the Travis Tritt hit from 1990.  This is a genuine, legit country club.  Think: manicured golf greens, goose filled ponds, a driving range, and a cold beer at the 19th hole.  Then think what would happen if the apocalypse happened and the golf course went feral.  It's a cattleman's dream.

A friend of ours purchased this abandoned golf course, one on which I used to play when I thought golf was a fun and worthwhile hobby, and let us put cattle on it to graze down the overgrown grasses.  We spent a few afternoons fixing fences, meeting the neighbors (who had a lot of questions), and adding gates and water troughs.  When the truck released the cattle -- a load of young heifers -- they were in awe.  Not of just the jaw-dropping views of Mt. Shasta, but of the knee high grass.

Release the hounds!

So now, checking the cows is the perfect excuse to grab an old rusty 9-iron, hit a few balls that have been dredged up from the pond, and sit back with a cold one and enjoy the solitude and the view.  Now that's my kind of country club.

Scott Valley Hello

We'll work on driving first, waving later

Whenever my wife and I are driving in a city I always get asked the same question: "Why are you waving at everyone?"  It's a fair question, and I can only say that old habits are hard to break.  Here in Scott Valley, you are pretty much required to wave.  At everyone you see.  I even feel a sense of guilt when I get caught zoning out and I forget The Wave.

And, yes, Scott Valley has its own wave.  It's the peace sign, oddly enough, and I've been noticing lately that more and more people are using it as their wave.  Of course, there are the head nodder wavers, and the flappy-hand wavers, and the one-finger wavers (usually the pointer finger, but sometimes the middle), and the rock-and-roll devil horns wavers, but also, there are an awful lot of peace-sign wavers.  So many that I've officially named it the Scott Valley Hello.

Too cool to wave

Why a peace sign, you might ask.  It all started with my brother, Greg.  His buddy, Roger, works for the county, so we pass him on the road a lot.  When you see the same person on the same stretch of road for several days in a row, you start to get creative with your waving.  Greg started giving Roger the peace sign and Roger thought it was hilarious.  So he started giving it back.  I thought it was funny, so I started using the peace wave at every car I passed.  From there, it took on a life of its own.

 And that is the origin of the Scott Valley Hello.