One Calving Season? Or Two?

Oftentimes, it is a practice to have two calving seasons – one in the spring and one in the fall. Dr Dick Diven gave thought to the idea that in north Missouri or other areas where the predominant cool season grass is the non-native toxic endophyte fescue, fall calving might be better than spring due to some believing the toxic effects would be reduced. The observed symptoms may be reduced since the outside temperatures are typically lower thereby giving the heat stressed cattle some relief from the vaso-constricting properties of the toxic endophyte. However, our extensive results on this practice show no advantage as far as reproductive improvement or increased production. Fall calving does, however, increase winter costs due to calving out of sync with the growing season. Keeping nursing pregnant cows in condition on stockpile grasses or hay is difficult and expensive. Additionally, having two separate breeding seasons adds considerably to the labor component.

Some ranchers choose to incorporate both seasons by allowing cows which come up open (not pregnant) in one season to dropping them into the following season vs selling her or holding it until the next spring calving season. On the face of it, this may sound wise.

Consider:

1. Without very careful written records, a cow can easily be rolled into each subsequent season without ever having a calf!!
2. Replacement heifers or, worse, keeping a bull calf, out of a cow which has missed, but you don’t know it can lead to devasting long term reproductive problems in the herd at large. Cows that calve only every other year may keep her good condition and wean a nice-looking calf, but she is not profitable if given a pass every year or two or more!
3. Having two calving seasons means two times of hauling the bulls out to every single cow TWICE! And getting them back in. Pregnancy checking then reveals, that there will be spring calving cows and fall calving cows in all the various herds. In our case, there are eight herds of cows!
4. Cows will be sorted at preg check as to fall or spring calvers, then hauled to whichever location has that group. Labor, labor, labor. There is always the possibility of a mistake and a fall calver ends up with spring calvers or vice versa. Total pain in the rear.
5. Two weaning times adds to stress and labor and incurs a less uniform calf crop.
6. Does not result in fewer open cows, but it does allow slackers to slip through by giving them multiple chances to ever breed and calve.

Without careful records, regardless of how you choose to manage the seasons, the risk is great that a cow can grow old without ever bringing in a ticket. Cows often will preg check carrying a calf, but either abort or lose the calf at some point. Can anyone afford to keep such an animal? Flipping cows from one season to the next greatly increases the chances that a cow will slip through.

In my opinion, calving in one season only, spring (May-June) – not winter – and have all cows in one herd – two at the most. This drastically reduces labor and then number of bulls one needs to cover the cows.

In this day and age of huge expense increases, written records are key, making culling decisions based on those records, imperative, selecting only adapted animals to grow your herd is a must. (records should include observing and recording which cows pant or stand in the pond or ditch, don’t slick off in the summer, those which can’t take the cold and stress of mud, humidity, flies, or whatever challenges are in your environment). Many of these observations will be revealed by cows coming up open or dead. Better to minimize either by eschewing purchasing unadapted animals and hoping they will adapt. The vast majority will not.

Create Beauty and Harmony in Your World

Rust, Rot, Depreciate

Starting with point #7 from last week‘s entry of setting oneself up for financially healthy ranching or business.

Reduce overheads! Stan Parsons said you only need a hammer and a wheelbarrow to be a financially successful rancher, and the wheelbarrow was questionable. Now, i might be paraphrasing, but his point is clear; that which rusts, rots, and depreciates is not an asset and likely adds labor and other unnecessary costs. Machinery, buildings, vehicles, even a stack of hay!

Nearly every ranch or farm has a massive amount of iron and steel piled around the farm or taking up space in a barn or shed of questionable value. Both the barn and the machinery must be pulled under scrutiny. Some farms may even have extra homes, though often the old homes and ancient barns may not even be worth tearing down, but the satisfaction of cleaning up a place may provide the incentive. However, there is also the issue of liability and, even the threat to health of livestock to leave such structures in place. Livestock has no need of buildings or machinery.

Approach each piece of machinery, barn, shed, house, corral, etc with a very critical eye. Be careful you aren’t fixing machinery and buildings you don’t even need! Additionally, consider whether or not you are making an overhead expense as a monument to tax evasion. If you purchase fence supplies, fuel, machinery, etc to offset income every year, what advantage is there except needing more room for storage and increasing chances of obsolescence and decay. Is it important to hoard fence supplies when you really don’t need to build fence? Even in our remote area with few people to do work, we can hire a fencing crew.

1. When was the last time i used this machine and why did i use it?
2. Do i have time to run this machine?
3. Does it have a purpose right now, this very moment in time which will add harmony to my life?
4. Does it have more value to someone else – in other words – before it is obsolete, would the kinder thing be to sell it to a younger person to give him an opportunity to purchase a needed piece at a discounted (used) price?
5. A shed or building may have value to someone else – either as selling it and moving it off your property (ideal) or if it’s in good condition and easily accessible maybe repurposed from storing your machinery you don’t need to leasing out the space. Remember though that maintenance expenses, depreciation, damage will still fall on you.
6. If a building is needed for necessities, be sure to update it so that it is easily used by all who need to. Consider overhead doors or smaller ‘people’ doors. Eliminating heavy sliding doors will save on health issues.
7. Corrals – good ones are a necessity on any ranch. There may be too many expensive systems scattered at various small parcels – Why? If the money has already been spent it becomes more difficult to decide the path forward. Should more money be spent to tear it out and sell the parts? or just leave it and use it once a year?

In some cases, the time to make the decision whether or not to spend wads of cash comes BEFORE the money is blown. This is most assuredly the case with more permanent type structures such as corrals and buildings.

I’m going to go so far as to say, the many farms, ranches, and businesses, could have ‘estate’ sales to generate 100s of thousands of dollars to reinvest and actually free up valuable time and be more profitable. In fact, you may have other valuable assets which need selling before they become liabilities or worthless. Harvesting mature trees comes to mind. Take inventory of your farm, ranch, and business. Decide what is not needed to keep it moving forward so it’s more rewarding – perhaps the next generation will be more interested in continuing the legacy you built with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

All the points i will be covering are so intertwined, it’s difficult to pull out each one as a standalone. Case in point is the example of excess corrals. Before spending 10s of thousands of dollars on multiple corrals, the better direction is likely to combine herds and build one good corral. If a small catch area is needed at another location, perhaps a mobile unit would be helpful. But better yet, the satellite location can likely be leased out or sold off.

The bottom line:

Sell off all unused machinery, buildings, vehicles, tools, etc   All these are liabilities and cause a lot of wasted time and expense in maintenance (labor and supplies), insurance, and depreciation.  Hoarding is not a good trait – help someone get started by selling off unused assets before they are obsolete.

Shabbat Shalom!

Create Something Beautiful Everyday!

Incredibly, this is an actual race (alleyway) that we still use. It is very dangerous with broken boards on each side which are sharp, jagged, but wired back into place. The remaining boards are just waiting to bust with a minimum amount of animal pressure. A few years ago, whilst quickly sliding a bar in behind an animal just at that crowding area, my finger was smashed against a bolt sticking out. Didn’t quite cut to the bone. It’s ridiculous, IMHO, to spend 10s of thousands of dollars on new seldom used corrals, when the main ones are badly neglected, yet are used quite often. Gates should swing and easily latch, proper sized race for type of cattle, butt stops, sharp edges, blind spots addressed, etc. Installing good equipment that can be used that will be far less than even one trip to the emergency room. Alleyways or races should be appropriately sized for the stock and have a back up gate. From experience, i’m so tired of bringing one calf at a time only to have the bloke manning the butt bar at the chute to miss and the calf barrels back into me, then having to crowd the calf back up to the headgate.

Piles of materials taking up valuable space and rusting down this past year. I’ve even toured farms and came upon a huge pile of brand new steel posts and multiple rolls of barbed wire completely engulfed by years of mature grasses and tree sprouts in the middle of the pasture! Not in good shape after 30 years or more. Count the cost BEFORE buying stuff to put into storage. The cost should include whether or not you have time or any help to get the job done. FIRST – do i really need this?

Building a corral with new materials, but in the wrong spot or in the same footprint which didn’t work before is a waste of time and money for decades. If the flow of stock didn’t work in the old layout, it won’t work even with new materials.

An Argument for Insourcing

Nathan’s Here:  Now, following a long delay, it is finally here!  I actually held off on publishing this because I couldn’t decide whether I should or not.  To be honest, before the week of research I spent before writing this essay I didn’t know very much on the topic of outsourcing.  What I did know, however, was that I was very strongly set against it.  Now, after that week of research, I still oppose outsourcing, but I have a better understanding of how little I know on the topic.  That said, here’s the argument essay I wrote in favorite of “insourcing” jobs back into the United States.

Today more than ever, current and future professionals must face the prospect of their jobs being sent overseas.  In 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor and Forrester Research, Inc. estimate that between 2003 and 2015 over 3 million jobs would move offshore (Young).  No longer is it only low wage manufacturing jobs that are being threatened, but also white-collar positions, from call center operators to paralegals.  As a nation, we must recognize the detriment this “offshoring” trend represents for both our economy and future generations of workers.

With the advent of modern modes of communication, even white-collar jobs previously thought safe from offshoring are being threatened.  From call center operators to informational technology jobs, roles which once could only be filled by domestic employees are now being replaced with much cheaper foreign equivalents.  And it’s not just jobs that require low skill or education levels that are being moved.  Alan S. Blinder, a respected author on the topic of offshoring, comments on the lack of correlation between the required education level of a job and how “offshorable” it is, “… it is easy to offshore working in a call center, typing transcripts, writing computer code, and reading X-rays.  The first two require very little education, the last two require quite a lot” (Blinder, par. 14).  Even employees who don’t face the offshoring of their positions can find themselves being forced to train foreign replacements being brought in from other countries, often on a temporary work visa such as the H-1B visa, or else forfeit their severance package after their inevitable release (Greenhouse, par. 6).

This trend of white-collar jobs being sent overseas also has severe implications for job seekers.  Shortly after the recession of 2008, Don Peck, deputy managing editor for The Atlantic, described the challenge of recovering from the job losses in that period, “Because the population is growing and new people are continually coming into the job market, we need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs a year … just to keep from sinking deeper” (Peck, par. 13).  This means that Forrester Research’s estimate of 300,000 jobs offshored every year represented 20% of the job growth needed to prevent the recession from getting worse!  However, the economy has since recovered, and new jobs are being created, though as Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brooking Institution notes, “In a sense, every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over.  They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next” (qtd. in Peck, par. 16).  The increasing variety of jobs which can be done remotely means that higher education is no longer a cure-all, and that many people who spent time and money obtaining a degree now find themselves out of their chosen career field.  Alan Blinder suggests that “the kind of education our young people receive may prove to be more important than how much education they receive” and that “looking forward over the next 25 years, more subtle occupational advice may be needed” (Blinder, pars. 16 & 17).  Where once it was common for students to go to college automatically, now students must consider future career options or else they risk joining a pool of terminally unemployed or underemployed career seekers burdened with student loans.

Offshoring jobs also has the dual effect of diminishing the skills of the talent pool in the U.S. and imparting those talents on workers in foreign nations.  Persons who find themselves displaced by offshoring can find it difficult to find new work, because as Peck asserts, “As a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode … leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well.  This can be made even more difficult by the other effect of offshoring: leveling of the playing field with foreign workers.  As jobs and equipment are sent overseas, those nations receiving them become more competitive with their American counterparts.

Proponents of offshoring argue that importing low-wage, low-skill services (sending those jobs overseas and importing the fruits of the labor) allows companies to streamline their services and creates more opportunity for high-wage, high-skill positions.  J. Bradford Jensen and Lori G. Kletzer, senior fellows at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, speak of a threshold above which jobs tend to be safe from offshoring, stating “Most employment in tradable service activities is above this threshold and thus most workers in tradable service activities are unlikely to face significant competition from low-wage, labor-abundant countries any time soon” (Jensen and Kletzer, par. 7).  They argue that a majority of employees in tradable jobs in the U.S. are above this threshold and hold a “competitive advantage” over comparable employees in those low-wage nations and as such it benefits the economy as a whole to allow those jobs which fall below the threshold to be sent overseas.

While their position is currently true and well-supported, it fails to take into account the trend of higher-wage jobs moving overseas.  Blinder describes this trend, saying, “Offshoring is no longer limited to low-end service jobs.  Computer code can be written overseas and emailed back to the United States.  So can your tax return and lots of legal work …” (Blinder, par. 9).  Where offshoring was once limited to basic services, modern communication has allowed more complex work to be completed in other nations.  How long before this trend surpasses the “comparative advantage” Jensen and Kletzer say protects U.S. jobs which are already considered tradable?

In an era of globalization, it is impossible to prevent at least some jobs from being sent overseas, but if we hope to avoid losing away our economic status and employment base, we must recognize the damage being dealt to the economy by offshoring and find a way to reverse the trend.

Works Cited

Blinder, Alan S. “Outsourcing: bigger than you thought: the outsourcing wave is about to hit the service sector.  To keep good service jobs, we need to prepare the workforce and understand the jobs.” The American Prospect. 17 Nov. 2006: 44+. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Greenhouse, Steven. “Offshore Outsourcing Will Cost Americans Jobs.” Outsourcing. Ed. David M. Haugen. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009.  Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. From “Offshoring Silicon Valley.” The American Prospect. 19 Jun. 2008: 18-20. Opposing Views in Context. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Jensen, J. Bradford, and Lori G. Kletzer. “Offshore Outsourcing Can Favor Some High-Skill Service Providers.” Outsourcing. Ed. Jenny Cromie and Lynn M. Zott. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2013. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. From “Fear and Offshoring: The Scope and Impact of Imports and Exports of Services.” 2008. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

“Number of U.S. Jobs Moving Offshore.” Free Trade. Ed. Mitchell Young. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009.  Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context.  Web.  13 Apr. 2015.

Peck, Don. “The Recession Has Caused the Highest Rate of Unemployment Since the Great Depression.” Jobs in America. Ed. Debra A. Miller. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2011. Current Controversies. Rpt. From “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.” The Atlantic. Mar. 2010. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Stuck Ewes

Yesterday, I found two ewes and a young lamb stuck in the muddy ditch.  Of course, I had not worn my mud boots, so my short work shoes would suffice, though I was up to my shins in sticky clay.  They were a bit of a challenge to remove leg by leg out of the muck, but with their cooperation and effort, I made fairly short work of it.

Today, I drove up with the specific purpose of walking the ditches in case more had found themselves engulfed in mud, but none were thankfully.  However, the storm moved in and i was completely soaked from the thunderstorm.  Additionally, I counted seven live newborn lambs as well as two ewes were beginning to go into labor.

We have missed the worst of these passing storms, however, and for that we are grateful.

Stay safe!

tauna

Summer Jobs

“…there is value in recalling the grit and glory of traditional summer work, which has taught generations of teenagers important lessons about life, labor, and even their place in the universe — which turned out to be nowhere as close to the the center as we had imagined.”

Dave Shiflett as quoted from the article “Get A (Real) Summer Job” in the Saturday/Sunday, April 25-26, 2015 Wall Street Journal Review Section.

Daughter, Jessica, working girl!

Sons, Nathan and Dallas, attaching a log chain to an old silo that is to be pulled down.

Christian Finck and Nathan Powell removing and repairing old corral as well as cleaning up and burning rubbish. Hot job!

Christian chopping out the side of an old self feeder to help get the fire burning.

Christian and Dallas burning rubbish and moving panels to set up larger corral.