Speaking of Weather

We managed to get about 100 acres cut on Wednesday and Thursday of this last week. This is good. Without stopping, I can cut 12 or 13 acres an hour but once you factor in breakdowns and filling Dynacure, it's significantly lower than that. For instance, I broke a bunch of sections on the first lap in the field and that took a good hour to completely fix--and that was with the help of my girlfriend. It's a little ironic that I just mentioned a few days ago that I'd never hit a snapping turtle with the swather because in that same field, I came as close to hitting one as I ever have. He was out wandering from one pool to another when we found him, but I couldn't resist the urge to go screw with him. There's a way to handle them safely: approach from the rear, grab near the end of the tail, and hold him out a foot or so from your body. (Sh/H)e'll still snap at you, but if you keep your arm out, you'll be fine:



On Friday we moved the swather to the next area we were cutting. We got there later in the day, around 7 pm. There were clouds gathering to the north and south, but we'd been hoping they'd move off to the east without bothering us. We cut a couple rows when my girlfriend said that she thought the clouds to the north were getting closer. We snapped a couple pictures of them but the storm was so big that it took two pictures:





I didn't believe her that the storm was coming our way--oops. They definitely were, and they were moving fast. I flagged down my father (who was driving the swather at the time) and we grabbed the two pickups and fled south, away from our house, but the only radio station we could get to work was warning about large hail from the storm, so we were booking it out of there. The whole way it was in and out of the front edge of the storm. Unfortunately, there were no pictures of this. We were just barely staying ahead at 50 to 60 miles per hour. The cross-winds were incredible; we saw huge clouds of dust billowing up away from the storm, sort of shaped like a negative-sloped asymptote. They were spooky, but they weren't rotating, so we continued on past them. The only cars we encountered going the other direction was a caravan of vehicles with antennae sticking out the roofs: storm-chasers, I think. Eventually we made it around the side of the storm and went back up north to our place.

Then another big storm hit Saturday evening. I was out to dinner with my girlfriend, and on the way back, we encountered hail twice. Neither time was large enough to cause damage, thankfully. But it was well under 1/4 mile visibility for several miles, so it was an adventurous trip home! We had gone to church Saturday evening so we could cut Sunday morning but it didn't matter; we were sufficiently rained out after the evening storm. We didn't cut at all on Sunday. We tried to go again today, but managed to get the swather stuck doing so. Too wet still. Hopefully tomorrow we have better luck. We're supposed to have several dry days in a row. It's about time.

Maybe I'll write about Dynacure in my next post.

Cattle Breeding: Episode 6 (Like Star Wars)

I've taken it easy since we found the body--at least as far as blogging goes. Ranch work has kept up the pace. The next morning, around 6:30, we took off for the third and final round of work to artificially inseminate some of our neighbors' cows. When some cows figure out what people want them to do, especially if it involves unpleasantness, will do precisely the opposite. Luckily, that was not the case with these. Though we do nothing but separate them from their babies, stick them in crowded places, and stick needles into them, they obliged us well in cooperating with herding them a final time into the corral. The calves weren't too crowded; some even laid down for awhile:





Don't worry, though, this is usually the sort of scenery they get to graze in:



The A.I. women arrived around 7:30. They drive a pickup with a big white thing behind it:



The darkness inside is supposed to calm them down, but I can only guess why they painted it white. I think I have a pretty good guess, though.

I did the same thing I've done the last two times: run the chute, placing iron bars in front of and behind cows to keep them moving down the alleyway. Not much to report there. He has one old cow that unfortunately had cancer eye a few years back, and they had to have it removed:



Kinda sad, but he said she was a good cow. At least she has one good eye.

At the end, we got to see how they do the actual A.I. They keep the semen cold in a large container of nitrogen until it's time to use it. It is kept in a longish straw-like piece of plastic which, when the time arrives, is put in a warm solution that brings it back to life. The veterinarian then inserts her right hand in the "number 2" hole (I'm not sure exactly what that did; maybe it moved the cervix in range of the "straw"). She then inserted the straw in the other hole and pushed the contents out, like a syringe. I though it was funny that the vet, as she put her hand in number 2, stored the syringe in the front of her overalls.

Chris, the guy whose cows they were, took us out to lunch afterward. That was appreciated.

We've been doing a lot of hay work, but I'll leave that for another post.

CSI: Farm Edition

Okay. So. Here's the deal. We were going to move the swather today, but that didn't happen because it rained down where we we're going to move it. When I found out that wasn't going to happen, I went to the airport and picked up my girlfriend! I had found a fuel leak before I left and my dad fixed that while I was gone. Chistine and I came back to the ranch and ate lunch. We had some other work to do on the swather, so we went back after lunch to do that. Dad had gone out to the cow pasture out north with a tool we needed, so we were stuck waiting for him. Around 2, we got a call from him saying that he had managed to get the truck stuck in the mud out there. We unhooked the new 7130 John Deere tractor from the baler and took some chains up north to pull him out.

On the way there, we saw a pickup parked in the approach where we'd just cut hay (and where I took those pictures of the adorable faun a couple days ago). It was blocking the entry to the field, so I was angry at them for interfering with our operation. We slowed down to make sure they weren't drunk or having sex or something. I didn't see anyone inside, but Christine said to back up and take another look. I did, and thought there might be someone behind the driver's seat after all. I pulled forward again and we got out.

The first thing we noticed was that there were no licence plates on the vehicle. Suspicious. The next thing I did was get the .22 out of the pickup. I was worried the guy might be dangerous. I realized that wasn't going to work though; I couldn't effectively aim a rifle and open the door at the same time. Plus, my girlfriend convinced me that it might not be a good idea to No Country for Old Men this one. Those possibilities exhausted, I called 911 and reported a dark blue Dodge Ram 2500 with no plates. They asked me to look at the VIN but it was covered with a sheet of paper and I was still reticent to open the door of the vehicle to move it. They said they'd call back in a little bit and that an officer was on the way.

I wanted to make sure the guy wasn't in any immediate health risk; if he was drunk or otherwise in bad shape, I didn't want to just leave him there and wait for the cops. I walked up the pickup and stood in front of the hood (so I could duck down if he decided to pop up with a pistol or something). I knocked on the hood hard, but he didn't move. I grabbed the grill guard and shook it pretty hard; my reaction to Christine was "Yeah, he's stiff." I walked around to the driver's side and took a closer look at him. Through the driver's side window, I could see a slumped figure, his right hand toward the passenger seat and his back to the window. More significantly, I could see a distinct red patch with a hole in the middle; it was on his left side around heart level. Christine had been on the phone with my dad (letting him know why we weren't going to be there right away to tow him out), so I called him right back up and said, "This guy's fucking dead." My father was on the line with the sheriff at the time, so he told him the news.

The dispatcher called me back and confirmed the report of a gunshot wound. A few minutes later, the first Meade County sheriff (or deputy?) arrived, who happens to be related to me. He checked it out and, once some backup arrived, they took our statements. It got crazy: two or three Meade County sheriff outfits and two highway patrol cars and at least the one ambulance. It was only during this shindig that I even thought about taking pictures. I had the opportunity to get a picture of the body, I think, but I decided that I didn't even want that. I've always been opposed to that sort of voyeurism and I didn't want to be a total hypocrite. Plus, I didn't think it would have been respectful to him. Here's a few I took during this time:







Here's the freakiest part: the approach where the car was parked was here (at Rosilee Lane), across the street from a development with several hundred people in it who all drive by that spot every day. One of those residents had their statement taken that the car had been parked there since yesterday. He had been there at least 24 hours and no one from that complex even batted an eye or thought to approach the vehicle. Granted, they probably thought it was us who had parked there to work hay, but if nothing else it says something about city people in general: they drive by and don't ask questions. Admittedly, we had a reason to this afternoon, as it was on our property. But I stop by parked cars in the countryside all the time, regardless of whose property it's on. I guess I just never realized the clash of worlds that could be involved in such a stop.

After they took our statements, they said we could go. We took the rest of the trip up north and pulled my dad out of the field, went back to the swather, finished working on it, collected some wood from a basement, and spent the rest of the evening retelling the afternoon's events. They deputy--my relative--called me back up later that evening and said that if we have any needs after coming up on the scene that we should not hesitate to give them a ring. He said they have resources for that, which must mean psychological aid for people who've gone through potentially traumatizing situations. We'll see. It's too soon to tell right now whether I'll be having recurring nightmares or not.

My mom and brother both said that that had always been one of their worst nightmares, finding someone dead on our property. This sort of thing isn't without precedent; at least two of out other neighbors have stumbled on similar things. One was way worse; some Indians had raped a woman and stabbed her to death with broken beer bottles in a driveway just a couple miles north of us. This was not nearly as gruesome as that, and I don't expect to be permanently scarred, but it is the first non-funeral corpse I've seen.

Just another day on the ranch.

How is babby formed? How cow get pragnent?: The Second of a Series

Yesterday, we moved on to the second stage of A.I.ing the neighbors' cows. Once we'd rounded up the herd, we took up stations--though we were significantly shorter-handed this time around. I worked the gates as last time, and Chris had made modifications to the chute so I wasn't in immediate risk of bodily dismemberment. That was nice. Despite being short on labor, things moved smoothly. We pulled the 'seeder' from their nether-regions and gave them a shot (maybe estrogen?) that's supposed to make them all ovulate. We'll actually A.I. on Wednesday at 6 am. Oh boy.

Then, today, we turned our bulls out (this means 'released into the cow herd'). We don't keep the bulls with the cows most of the year so we can control calving season. We turn out for 45 days, the heifers (virgin females) a month before the cows. The heifers we release in mid May for a calving season beginning at the start of March, and the cows are expected to start calving around the first of April. As for the release today, I only helped with the front end of this operation. It was raining today, and there are few tasks less pleasent than 4-wheeling in those conditions. The bulls are close to our house, so it wasn't a long ride. There were 4 bulls, three of which were being turned out today. I did my best to round them up, but when bulls are chased, they get to fighting. In this weather, I was surprised to see them so eager to spar, but they did. It's realyy quite impressive. They are amazingly fast and as they butted heads, they slid around the wet grass like angry, 2000 pound kids on a slip-and-slide. I couldn't break them up, but I could just point the 4-wheeler at the point where their heads met and they would avoid me all the while they fought each other.

I was having trouble keeping them together, so I tried something different: I got behind the leader and ignored the other 3. Somewhat to my surprise (and, as I later found out, my father's), the other three started to follow behind. They're either starving for attention or aware at some level that going where I want = sexy-times later for them. I chased the one all the way to the corral, and the others followed suit. My dad later asked, 'Why'd you just chase the leader?'I didn't really have an answer; I just said, 'Well, the others followed!' He said, 'I guess you know what you're doing.' That was fun to hear.There are instincts in this, and sometimes things work that you wouldn't expect to work. You just have to read the situation.

I had to do more of that reading a few minutes later when we were loading two of them on the trailer. We picked two from the group, but quickly realized they were the wrong two to put together; they fought vigorously and with abandon. I found myself in a very small pen with them when they really went after it. I climbed the gate as quick as I could and about a second later, there was about a ton of bull forced violently into that very location. Instincts are important, even life-saving. If I weren't as attentive or as quick as I was, things could have gotten pretty messy.

Tomorrow, we move the swather! And my girlfriend comes in from out of town! Yay! Hopefully I can keep her alive.

Red Hands and Climate Change

In past years, the time school lets out has usually been about the time cows are calving and fence needs fixing. This year, I completely missed the former and managed to avoid the latter (I don't like fixing fence). It's usually during one of those long fence fixing days that I first forget to put on sunscreen and end the day with a wicked sunburn that lasts a week or so: the proverbial "farmer's tan." After the burn, I usually just forget sunscreen after that; it never burns bad enough to hurt after the first time.

This year was different, and not only because I arrived late. It has been a cool and rainy spring, so much so that both branding and fencing were accomplished mostly in long-sleeved shirts and even coats. When I first arrived and moved cows, conditions were similar; the end of the day caught me red handed and in significant pain. The backs of my hands peeled and itched, but ended up way tanner than the rest of me until yesterday when we moved cows again while it was actually sunny and warm.

These sorts of conditions perpetuate certain features of local rhetoric surrounding climate change. Every day temperatures are below normal, people are either thinking or saying, "So much for global warming!" Many scientists and other people now substitute "global climate change" in lieu of "global warming," but part of the reason the old term doesn't die away is because global warming is easier to understand and easier to critique. Nuanced positions, once internalized, are harder to critique; simplistic summaries are quite different.

The other feature of rhetoric around climate change is its relationship to structures of faith and belief. Culturally, the discussion about climate change here has been framed as one of 'belief'; people who accept it do so as an act of faith, and people who do not often do so as what they believe to be an intrinsic aspect of their Christian faith (usually related to God's sovereignty or somesuch). Now, I have a lot more to say on the relationship between faith and science, but for now the following will suffice. In our scientific world where most fields have advanced beyond the ability of most laypeople to interpret and keep informed, there is a sense in which people must 'have faith' in those who know the data best. Linguistically, at least, that is a form of belief, taking someone at their word.

But framing the discussion as a matter of faith is not entirely acceptable. After all, the other side at least claims to be something much more than mere fancy. Is it ideological? Sure. But that doesn't make it any less objective. Cultural discussions of climate change must engage with those who are deepest in the field; without concrete reference to actual climate scientists, neither side can make legitimate claims. I'm not asking such scientists to present their data on primetime television, but neither do I expect a simple answer, necessarily.

At the broadest level, the debate is really about what is meant by a scientific
'consensus.' I just heard Rush Limbaugh say the other day that there is no significant scientific consensus that points to a worldwide, human-caused temperature increase. That's already a pretty nuanced denial, but the heart of it is the idea of consensus. How many scientists, or what percentage, constitute a consensus? Who counts as a scientist? What sorts of opinions constitute a "camp" that can be lumped together? I have never heard any of these questions addressed (at least by the (politically) 'conservative' side), though I admit my own exposure is pretty light.

Whatever happens, South Dakota is fine, I'm afraid. It will take many years before changing rain patterns would be able to cause long-term soil changes that could in turn affect the use of this sort of terrain. If the coasts flood, not all that many people will move to fly-over country. Agriculture, at least as practiced here, isn't really that significant a cause of the phenomenon (by anyone's accounting, I believe), so whether these people "believe" in it or not may not really matter.

Both sides have ideological commitments, but that should not prevent us from talking about real scientific data. We're grown ups; we can do our best, just give us a chance. I know that sounds like a contradiction of what I said at the outset. But I think we deserve the chance, at least. As the debate is framed right now, the data is to the scientists as the Bible was to the medieval clergy. Perhaps a reformation is needed to make the data accessible to a larger clientele...but we also know how successful the first Reformation was at clarifying debates about Scriptural data.

No conclusions tonight, I guess, except this: the debate about climate change is really one about broad cultural disagreements concerning scientific authority and the role of faith. Both have legitimate concerns that must be acknowledged for any cogent discussion of the matter. But that's not likely any time soon.

So Many S.O.B.s

"He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

--Melville

"We're going to St. Onge! Ellen wants to treat her bulls!" With such words did I awake this morning. I was up and out the door by 7:30, with the promise (ha!) that we'd be done working cows by noon. Nothing surrounding Ellen is on time. It's not necessarily her fault; her husband died a few years back, and she's got all kinds of people who want to give her advice on how to run the ranch. She usually steps back and lets them walk on her--her family members included. She has ideas and could probably do okay, but there are often way too many cooks in that kitchen. Such was the case today.

One of those cooks was an old fart, the first SOB of the day. I later found out that he was the same guy who called my dad up a few days ago and told him how to run his haying operation. Oh, that pissed me off. We have one of the best operations with the best equipment out there, and he was saying how "I've never used that DynaCure, you don't need that! You don't need to rake hay! Here's how you wipe your butt while I'm at it!" What a SOB. The kind who always knows what's best, but who's too old and stubborn for anyone to try to tell him otherwise. Since I'll never see him again, I was tempted to just let him have it. But it wasn't a fight worth fighting. Besides, the old SOB's wife has Alzheimer's, and she was along for the ride. Since one of my grandmothers had it, I decided to take pity rather than get angry. I don't envy what he has to deal with there. She stayed in the pickup all morning.

We weren't working cows at Ellen's house; we were hauling in panels and a head-catch into a part of her ranch called "Stinkin' Water," which is apparently the creek that runs through it. It is so far in the middle of nowhere, it's not even funny. At the center of the above link, this is the only sign of civilization you'll see--other than fence lines--for several miles in any direction:



Including roads, they don't believe in those.

We were to work two of her three bulls: one with pink-eye and the other with hoof-rot. I don't know much about either, except that the first makes cows blind and the second makes them limp. For animals whose primary job this time of year is to have sex, neither of those impediments is a good thing. We found the bulls, along with another cow with hoof-rot, and started pushing them toward the corrals we'd set up. We let the rest of the herd drop back and, in retrospect, that was our major mistake. One bull decided to jump the fence, and the chase was on--the second SOB of the day.

Ironically, it was the bull with a bad foot that took off, and we soon found that he could run on it quite well. I thought we could fatigue him into submission, but chasing a bull out there is not like chasing cattle anywhere else; the shrubbery provides all too ample cover for them to hide. They can be right in front of you and not see them. I was swerving and ducking and brushing my way through trees and brush trying to keep up with this bull on my 4-wheeler for over an hour. As the youngest person there, it was my honorary position to have the worst 4-wheeler and the point position on chasing the bull. It was probably for the best; I probably couldn't have gotten the bigger 4-wheelers into some of the places I took the little one. We got him out in the clear after about an hour of chasing, but then he made straight for the stock dam--an old goddam motherfraking trick cows learn:



Fuck you, bull.

I was going to chase it in the water, but my father, a somewhat more convincing Starbuck to my Ahab, said not to bother. We got the other cow and bull--and later another cow and calf--in the corral and treated them. The other bull must have repented of his wickedness in the cleansing dam-waters of cow-baptism, but I'll need to see him amend his ways before I am convinced of the sincerity of his repentance. I think he was just following the herd.

After we got out of there, Ellen took us to the third S.O.B.:



It's pretty dive-y, at least it would be at night. I remember stories about them having to work hard to keep business there when a second bar opened up in St. Onge a few years back. I don't know if the other one's still around.

We went home and immediately went back out to the field to finish baling some hay I'd cut a few days back. It was still a little more wet than it should have been (mid 20% moisture readings), but we figured it was better to have it mold a little than get rained on again tomorrow.

We got a call from a neighbor who had just bought a new baler and needed some help putting up about 50 acres that evening. We obliged him and were out till after 9 pm finishing up. I had to keep ahead of two balers with the rakes, which is a tall order, but one of the balers' twine--net wrap--was in backwards and it took them a good hour to figure out what the hell was wrong. I ended up raking most of it, and then jumping on the working baler and baling most of the rest of the field while they tried to fix the other one. What a mess.

At least there weren't any SOB's at the end of the day. In fact, the owners of the land we cut came out to the field and gave us all beers. I was amazed that I'd never realized that there can't be any laws about what you can and can't drink on a tractor in a field. I've seen it done before, but I think this was the first time I was drinking beer and haying at the same time. After this day, I needed it. Happiness is a beer, a smooth-riding tractor, hay, a sunset, and a .22 in the cab for some reason, keeping me company and American.

O Dear, O Deer, O Deere

I've been told I should include more pictures. And respond to comments that have been left. I'm going to do at least one of those tonight: put pictures of adorable animals on my blog! I hear that's pretty much pure internet gold for blogging success. I can't put too many on; my parents' internet connection is limited to 5 GB/month. I know, country life is so hard. Here's the faun I saved from utter annihilation:



He was so tiny! Just the newest of newborns. His heart was pounding so fast, but littler things have higher pulses, anyway, so I don't really know what standard faun rates are. His legs, sort of visible below, were so tiny that he couldn't even run through the alfalfa. I could basically walk alongside him and he'd be going at top cruising speed:



And, despite what must have seemed like his imminent bodily dismemberment at the hands of a ferocious predator, he seemed curious and probably surprised to know that the world was bigger than just the few feet of grass around him:



Such a cutie. Also, here's a picture of the moon on the horizon... OR IS IT???



Maybe the optical illusion isn't as good as I thought, but it's actually a salamander in the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket. Not quite as cute as a wittow faun, sorry. More real posts this weekend, I think.

Haying 101

Perhaps I should back up a step and make sure things are perfectly clear for everyone. Here are some facts:

1. Cows eat grass. Not always, but while we own them, that is the vast majority of their food. In the winter, we sometimes feed a grass-corn mix that has a higher conversion rate of feed to meat. Also, they burn more calories staying warm in the winter, so they do better with the mix.

2. Grass comes from fields. Occasionally, we plant grasses, usually alfalfa, to provide them with higher-protein food. Alfalfa can be too rich, though (horses especially are susceptible to "foundering" on too much green grass), so we prefer to feed an alfalfa-grass mix. By grass, I mean whatever grows: hardy, native grasses.

3. Grass doesn't grow during the winter. As you may know, it gets pretty cold up here, and things can get tough in January and February. If you put cows in an ungrazed pasture with less than, say, 4 inches of snow cover, cows will forage under the snow for the leaves buried beneath. They can actually do quite well on this. When the snow gets deeper or when the field was grazed in the fall, they can't do this.

4. There is more grass in the summer than the cows can eat in that time. Ranchers (sensible, "sustainable" ones) only raise as many cattle as they can support year round. If you graze all your pastures during the summer, you have to buy hay all winter. That gets expensive, at least some years.

Haying is what results from these facts: ranchers become farmers, storing up hay for the winter months. We put up a lot of hay, quite literally. Our hay yard, in the fall, will have several hundred tons of hay that are fed out two or three bales at a time, every other day or so, over the course of the winter. A bale of hay, for our purposes, is the big round kind, not the big or small rectangular bales. My father still complains about the days he put up square bales all summer. We still make a few small alfalfa bales (weighing around 50 to 70 pounds each) occasionally for cows who have just calved in the barn; they need the protein of good alfalfa hay.

These days, we make round bales that weigh between 1,200 to 1,500 pounds each, stacked into 28- or 32-bale stacks (18 first row (3 by 6), 10 second row (2 by 5) and, possibly, 4 third row (1 by 4). The number depends upon how much they weigh; if we intend to move them on the roads, stack-movers won't do it if they're over the axle weight limits. Somebody who moves hay for us once got fined $13,000 for being over the axle limit with a load of our hay. So now we only make our stacks with 28 bales.

The actual process of haying is, for us, four steps: cutting, raking, baling, and stacking. A swather cuts hay; ours is a 4895 John Deere with a 16' header (where the hay goes in) and a reel and auger cutting system (as opposed to a rotary system). It deposits the hay into a 3 foot wide row called a 'swath.' Once the hay is on the ground, we leave it to dry a couple days, until its moisture content gets down below certain values. If you don't wait, the hay will heat up as bacteria digest it, and it can spontaneously combust. If it doesn't burn, it will certainly mold; that also ruins hay.

Rakes are large spinning reels that collect two of the swaths together into one. The rakes are run at the same time as the baler to speed up baling and reduce wear and tear on the baler. Our rakes are Vermeer. The baler, run simultaneously by another operator (in most operations, but not all), is the thing that actually collects and contains the hay by wrapping it in either twine or net-wrap. We switched to net wrap a couple years ago because it cuts baling time by almost a 1/3. I won't go into details now. Our baler is a John Deere 566 (unfortunately, no Mega-Wide pick-up for us).

Stacking is my least favorite part, because it requires one's full attention and I'm not very good at it. We just got a self-leveling John Deere grapple fork on our new tractor, but I can't remember the model number for it or the one on the old tractor that isn't self-leveling.

These are some of the basics of haying. I was out cutting again today, and I have some ... I'll just say it, adorable pictures of a faun I managed to save today. It was the youngest faun I think I've ever seen; I was actually able to catch it because the alfalfa was taller than it was. I guess I'm glad it's not dead. It was just so darn cute. I might post pictures of it tomorrow.

Hay Season Arrives

Today has been very busy. We moved cows in the morning, a pretty routine deal with no major hiccups. I was anxious to do something this afternoon, and we decided it was time to start cutting hay. I'd done prep work last week: I changed the hydraulic oil (25 gallons!) and the radiator fluid. All we had to do was make sure I had all the right tools and enough extra guards to fix a breakdown. I cut the hay yard for practice, to make sure everything ran before we got too far from home. With a top cruising speed of 13 MPH, you don't want to have to backtrack.

There in the stackyard I found the year's first crushing victim. As will become clear as the season progresses, swathers kill a lot of critters. In general, crushing deaths are better and faster than cutting deaths; I don't have to get out and beat crushed animals with a hammer till they stop squirming. The good news: I only noticed this victim--a baby rabbit--because I saw his brother or sister hopping to safety. Horray. Rabbits are the easiest to hit (not that that's a good thing), because they have a freezing instinct when they're in tall grass. It doesn't work very well when there's a 16 foot wall of pointy death approaching. They're also easy to kill because they're so darn fragile. A couple years ago, I managed to stop in time for a little rabbit to escape. I got out and tried to chase it into the clear where it would be safe. Instead, it decided to run straight into the (disengaged--not moving) header of the swather. This should not have been a problem. However, a perhaps little known fact about rabbits is that they have loose and poorly attached skin. My dad told me that he accidentially skinned one once just by picking it up by the skin. This little guy ran straight onto one of the tines of the reel teeth, skewering itself as it continued to try to hop away. I carefully removed the rabbit from its self-inflicted body piercing and set it aside. Maybe it lived?

Other animals are harder to kill in a swather. Deer will usually run, though my uncle, the story goes, once tangled a full grown deer in the header. It wasn't dead yet, either. He always carried a handgun in the swather after that; it must have affected him significantly. I've run fauns--more than I can count--and porcupines through this new swather. It doesn't even hiccup. I never notice. I didn't realize how fast this new swather was (up to 7.9-8 mph in field gear) until my dad told me a few years back that I'd hit a raccoon--a critter usually way too fast and smart to get in the way. I've hit turkeys, nests, birds, maybe even prairie dogs. Just part of the job. The only thing I don't think I've hit is a snapping turtle. That wouldn't be fun.

In the second full field today, there was a success story, though. I saw a bird start to rise from the grass, but there wasn't time to stop. Usually, that's endgame. But this little guy, after a couple seconds, rose up out of the spinning reel! It was a pleasant surprise (for me) and a rude wake-up call for the bird, I suppose.

I probably knocked down 60 acres today. I average 11-12 acres an hour, plus stops to refuel and put more DynaCure in (I'll explain that some other time). Overall, a very successful day. No broken guards or sections, no other breakdowns. Now we just wait a couple days to see if it rains on it. If not, it'll bale by Friday evening, probably. It's alfalfa, so it's really hard to bale well. Again, the subject of another post. Weevel, too: those deserve separate mention as well. All in good time. For now, rest in peace, little bunnies.

On Billboards

Yesterday and today, I helped a friend from high school move from Brookings, SD to Rapid City. On the way back, I took notice of the variety of billboards that line our interstates. Since nearby Rapid City just passed two ordinances limiting this mode of advertisement, I thought I'd take a moment to muse on them.

Most SoDak billboards are obviously aimed toward tourists. There are tons of billboards for Wall Drug, perhaps the most heavily advertised location on the planet. Starting back in the Korean war (or something like that), a family member of the proprietors of Wall Drug decided to advertise for the family business while he was shipped out. Thus began a long tradition of having Wall Drug signs in ridiculously distant places: "WALL DRUG: Only 6,320 Miles!" They even have a sign in SD that is itself an advertisement for another of its signs: "WALL DRUG: Sign in KENYA, AFRICA." Hilarious. Wall Drug itself, sorry to say, does not live up to the hype. It's not that it tries and fails; I think most Dakotans, the people of Wall included, recognize that the joke is on the tourists that stop there. It's a small town with a large, kitschy strip mall, free ice water, 5 cent coffee, a big, rubber T-Rex, and a 6 foot Jackalope. All that said, you should definitely go.

Another billboard has even earned a status as an inside joke between my brother and myself, an ad for a location that I refuse to advertise explicitly: "None mean, Real keen, PRAIRIE DOGS." I hate the phrase, but I can't get it out of my head once it's there! Reptile Gardens, the various Black Hills caves, and Sturgis sites are among the most common of the tourist-y billboards.

Other billboards are more ambiguous in their target audience. We have one prominent billboard next to a Catholic cemetery that says "Abortion Kills!" Now, SoDak is, generally speaking, a pro-life state, so that board must see itself directed toward those liberal tourists coming through. Or something. There are also a good number of bible boards with phrases like, "The Wages of Sin is DEATH," and "Believe on the Lord Jesus and You will be SAVED." That one's probably for the bikers at rally time.

The only billboard that actually got me angry on my trip across the state today was a set of two boards for a Conoco gas stop. The first said: "Next rest stop: anyone's guess" and the second read "Gas stop now, or gas can later." I got riled up because of the stereotype under which the billboards functioned. I understand that they are meant to be humorous, but their ability to bring in business is dependent upon people accepting the premise that South Dakota is a barren wasteland spotted with rare and distant oases of civilization. Furthermore, rather than attempt to provide any valuable information, such as the actual distance to the next gas stop, those boards play on tourists' fear of coming up short. The moral of the story: don't buy Conoco gas, those insensitive Dbags.

Another large category of signs are the agriculture signs. There were a bunch of boards for this website, and I thought those were good. Others were probably aimed at out-of-staters who don't know much about the area. One of the read: "Beef: Our STEAK in the FUTURE!" Bggh. Terrible. Another was awesomely belligerent: "We Dakotans REJECT Animal Activists! Beef, Poultry, Swine, and Fur are our LIVELIHOOD." I get a good chuckle out of that one. Who's that for? Maybe a reminder to in-staters? A warning to all those activists cruising the interstate? What is the reader supposed to do after reading that sign? I'm not sure. A third reads: "Help Control Animal Populations: WEAR FUR." 100% pure awesome.

There are also signs that are notably absent. The only reservation sign I remember is one for Rosebud Casino. It's about 50 miles from the interstate; the I-90 interstate route doesn't intersect with any reservations. In my mind, it's pathetic; the tribal lands in Minnesota are at least near major population centers and thus capable of drawing a significant crowd, but this poor casino is relatively remote, and its sign was not well-maintained. Though the family-farm-protection signs are important, what I deem lacking are similar signs for native peoples. There's no signs like: "Help our Native Peoples out of Abject Poverty" or "Pine Ridge: POOREST County in the NATION. What happens next is up to US" or "Stop the Sale and Transportation of Alcohol to the Reservation!" More on that some other time.

Beyond the content of the signs, the passage of the Rapid City billboard laws brings up a more holistic question about the purpose and nature of billboards. I earlier criticized the Conoco boards for perpetuating a sort of "Buttfuck, SD" mentality, but in a way, all billboards do precisely this. Their ubiquity along the interstate is an implicit judgement that there's nothing better to look at for over 300 miles of road.

Don't get me wrong; driving in SoDak can be boring. It most certainly does not require one's full attention. But that doesn't mean that I don't like driving here. I find it one of my best chances to think. Whether I'm driving to town, cruising the interstate, or swimming laps in a hayfield, the endless rolling hours help to clear one's mind. I will occasionally turn on the radio (usually KBHB 810 Farm Radio, The Most Powerful Radio Station in South Dakota) or plug in my iPod, but it's fairly common for me to just sit and think for a few hours.

These sorts of habits are not encouraged by billboard America. They direct your thoughts, distract the mind, and ignore the geography. When these new Rapid City ordinances passed, some people complained that local business would suffer. Perhaps. But if South Dakota is to remain a place worth visiting--a place where people can hear their thoughts and enjoy unbroken scenery--the absence of billboards might actually bring more business to the state.

Boredom, rather than the reigning board-dom, might be best, both for the state and for its drivers. Boredom reminds us that life is lived in large chunks of inactivity, people passed out in the back seat, people alone with their thoughts, people staring blankly out the window at nothing at all. It is our ability to cope with this boredom and transform it into tranquility and profundity that is not only the essence of monasticism, but an essential part of human living. The ability to savor life, knowing that each mile brings you closer to your last, is intolerably difficult. The moment we realize we're doing nothing but get closer to death, we immediately move on to something else, either as a distraction or as an attempt to stave off that result for a little while longer. But perhaps we'd be better off if we turned our eyes toward the gaps between the billboards, and let the expanses teach us a lesson in mortality. It can't hurt to try; after all, what else are you going to do?

A.I.: Artificial Insemination

Not quite the Spielberg flick, I'm afraid. Yesterday, our neighbor, Chris McFarland, asked me and my father to help him breed his cows this year. He's trying something new, at least for me and my father: artificial insemination. More on the nuts and bolts in a bit. It was short notice; he let us know yesterday afternoon, and he needed our help this morning. We determined that it was possible, since we Catholics are allowed to cheat and go to Sunday Mass on Saturday night.

We did so, and the priest looked a little surprised to see us; my dad always goes to church on Sunday morning. We chatted for a bit, and my father explained to the priest that we had to get up early tomorrow morning to artificially inseminate the neighbor's cows. The priest joked, "That's against Catholic teaching!"--by which he meant artificial insemination for the conception of human life. He looked at me, knowing that I'm a theology student, and asked: "And he's letting you do this?!" I just said, "I think I can tell the difference between a cow and a human!" and left it at that. He responded, "You're not working with Catholic cows!"

This morning, we loaded up the 4-wheelers on the trailer and rounded up cows. On my way to a few stragglers, I think I hit 2 or 3 nesting birds. Include their nests, and you can add 5 or 10 more to the list of those animals who die to put a steak on your plate and a burger at McDonalds. Anyway, we sorted the cows from the calves (they are still together; later this fall they will be separated, or "weened") and started running them down the chute.

I ran the chute, which means putting in a metal rod, the bar, between cows so that the front ones don't move backward and the back ones don't move forward too quickly. Believe it or not, it's one of the more dangerous jobs. If you insert the stick too slowly or in the wrong place, an advancing or retreating cow can hurl the bar into your body with impressive force. I've heard stories of broken arms and legs, perhaps even worse, so I keep a close eye on my bar dynamics and the cows' positions. The job was rendered all the more difficult today by the fact that the bar I started with was slightly bent and not solid metal; it was a semi-hollow tube. As cows ran into it over the next hour and a half, the bar would turn so that each impact made the bend slightly worse. By the end, it had probably at 45 degree bend in it; it looked like a three foot boomerang. Accurately slipping that turning, bent rod between advancing cattle while keeping all my fingers intact was a tricky job that kept getting trickier, but here I am typing away. I survived.

The technical details of the A.I. were briefly explained to my dad and I after we were mostly done. What we were doing today was inserting a hormone suppressant into the cows' vaginas. Before insertion, it looked like a white, upper-case "I" (sans-serifs) with a string attached; when inserted, it unfolded into an upper-case "T" to hold it inside the cow. It's job was to greatly reduce the cow version of estrogen in their body, tricking them into thinking they'd just dropped an egg. A week from now, we'll remove those "T"s and give them a shot of cow-estrogen that will make them all ovulate more or less simultaneously. Then, precisely 60 hours after that second stage (don't ask me who discovered the time-frame), the actual A.I. will happen.

I can't say how that is done yet (since I've never seen it), but this is where things get really interesting. While correct that the Catholic A.I. ban is only on humans, the ethical issues around A.I. in general are perhaps more complicated than my exchange with the priest last night led on. Perhaps most curious is the development of what is called "sex semen." No, this is not a tautology; it refers to the ability to sort through a bull's semen to pick out which individual spermatozoa will result in a male calf and which in a female. Using sex semen, herds can currently be skewed to 70/30 or better for the gender split. Some have told me 90/10, but that might not be practical, actually. It's similarity to the practical consequences of China's one-child policy (30 million more men than women) might be striking, except in cattle, producers are more likely to want females than (apparently) China does. I haven't heard statistics on what the overall trends in gender production have been; some people want heifers (females) and some want bulls and steers. It depends on the operation of each individual ranch.

China's one-child policy has unmasked a cultural undervaluation of female children, an implicit sexism. If such a study were to be done on the cattle industry, would similar trends arise? Would there be a cow-sexism against males or females? Taking a step back, can there even be such a thing as "cow sexism"? That is, even if such trends exist, are they ethically significant? Does such a practice improve or detract from our appropriate use of the gifts of the earth and our scientific rationality? I don't know, at least not at 12:30 in the morning. For me, in this instance, my conscience has not been put on alert. Right now, my dad has the opportunity to watch an experiment for free, using someone else's cows to see whether he's happy with the results of this process.

As for A.I., the Catholic theological ban is in place because of the belief that the human sexual act has intrinsic value that cannot (or should not) be separated from its unitive or procreative ends; by separating sex from procreation, human A.I. fails to grasp the fullness of what the human sex act means. It is not clear to me that cow sex is invested with this same meaning; cows have not evolved as (generally) monogamous creatures with life-long procreative partners. My intuition, then, is that A.I.'d cows could indeed be fully "Catholic." But the sex semen thing, that's a whole new, sci-fi twist on the question. That encroaches on questions of genetic selection and genetic modification, questions I'm not prepared to answer tonight. We'll see how the process unfolds over the next couple weeks.

A Difficult Note on Language

Since I had to relocate the blog because I misspelled "yoke" as "yolk," I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the nature of language out here. My girlfriend tells me I develop an accent while I'm in South Dakota. Maybe. I'll admit that over the summer it probably affects my word choice just as much as it affects my skin tone.

One important factor in my changing patterns is that there's a lot more talking that goes on out here than there is reading. Many, if not most, weekdays find my father and a few other old ranchers perched in the local truck stop, their backs toward the wall, watching people come in, shootin shit, and drinking coffee. My mother calls it "truck stop news," which in her mind means its not very trustworthy: more tall tales than hard facts, more social rumors than interest in tracing down their origins, more here-say than a judge could shake a stick at.

In its own way, this sort of lunchtime banter defines how these ranchers, at least, come across their news. Things are changing, admittedly. One rancher today started off a new tangent saying, "I got an ee-mail the other day..."; and even before the internet, there were always newspapers, too. But there is an irreducible oral quality to the culture I know out here. It affects the way people think and it certainly affects their ability to spell. Not to excuse my own mistake, of course! But I wanted to put the mistake in context, at least, and explain that it's been many years since I've seen the word "yoke" spelled out, and that was probably in a bible, not in a ranch magazine.

While I'm discussing language, I thought I'd also discuss racism a little. I know, you're thinking "yippee, just what I wanted." It wouldn't really do to call it "implicit" here; it's often times fairly near the surface. It most commonly appears in peoples' word choice. Perhaps most offensively, there is a term out here for a Native American that I'm hesitant to repeat, but, since language really is important, I'll say it: prairie-nigger. I have some neighbors that use it all the time, one who was a close friend in high school. I remember, a number of years ago, chuckling the first time I heard it, actually. In its own completely terrible way, it's clever, it's catchy. It takes up an entirely different story of inequality and oppression and adopts it wholesale into this local situation. And because it find expression in fly-over country, no one pays any attention to it. The racism it suggests infects the way we think; if one finds beer bottles on the road or in the ditch, the first thing said is usually, "those indians were out drinkin again."

Another remarkable instance I encountered today was a story about a multi-generational gathering of Native Americans on the 4th of July to shoot fireworks. There's some important background to it, though; on dry years, we chase off anyone shooting fireworks, cursing those city people who think they can just come out and risk starting a fire on someone else's property. It was on one of these years, and after the gentleman telling the story asked the Indians to leave, they started a fire, which he quickly put out. As the story was recounted, "The buck--the chief--of the group said, 'We're outta here, you don't have to tell us twice.'" Again, the usage of "buck" here is clever, catchy; it satirizes native beliefs about communion with nature while less satirically and more, well, terribly, identifying them with that nature in a way invariably offensive.

I feel bad even writing these stories, these realities of my world out here. But I hope my intention is clear: I think South Dakotans can do better. Ranchers are capable of sympathizing with Indians. Stories circulate about how the family rancher is going the way of the Indian, the next group of people being socially (if less physically) forced from the land. This is a narrative that can be positively appropriated. But the preceding shows that there is plenty that is yet to be excised.

The process will undoubtedly be complicated, too. There are legitimate concerns of private property rights raised by ranchers. It certainly does not work to displace these inhabitants to give it to some other "earlier" inhabitants. As much as private property rights are recognized and emphasized, it is equally important for the locals to recognize and emphasize the religious liberties of the Native peoples. These are all too often dismissed out of hand as a power-play. When issues of land rights around Bear Butte (a Native religious site; more on that some other time) arise, the White response is invariably, "Those Natives only go up there to get media attention" or "How many Natives have ever climbed the Butte?" How many Christians make it to church on Sundays?! How many Christians show up at church because it makes them look good?! Those demographic facts have nothing to do with the basic rights that lie behind them.

Language is an amazing thing, its use and misuse complicated social phenomena. By letting certain speech patterns die or find open derision (as in this post), I hope that I, as someone who hopes to be a member of this community, can help bring the changes needed. Ugg.

At least I can say I branded this year

We loaded up some cows to take to the sale barn up in St. Onge (my etymology:St. Onge->Sainte Ange->Holy Angel) today. 6 cows, three calves: no problem, right? They are in our creek bottom, and the creek is very high, almost impassibly so. And of course they got pushed in the wrong direction and ended up on the opposite side of the creek. I managed to eek my 4-wheeler across our washed-out crossing, but getting them back across was challenging. The grass was wet, the cows were feeling good in the cool weather, and the chase was on. I thought we finally had them so they'd go down to the crossing, but my father was talking on his cell phone and they went the opposite way I wanted them to. Ridiculous. I was so pissed at him, I left and went back to the house. I wasn't sure if I was going back. I played a little piano downstairs, and then decided that that was about fair; if he could take a cell phone break in the middle of moving cows, then I could take a piano break. I came back refreshed and substantially less angry. The cows were still uncooperative, primarily because they were being led by the cow-bitch number 202 again. I'll be glad when she's gone, but we're keeping her till the fall, apparently. Since she has twins, we need to keep her with the herd so the calves have a chance to grow up on milk stolen from the rest of the herd.

We loaded some of our cows and some of the neighbors' on our trailer and my father took off. This afternoon, that neighbor, Chris McFarland, needed to brand three of his calves, the youngest and latest of the season. My mother and I went to help. We poured and preg-guarded two of the cows: the pour-on is for parasites and the preg-guard is vaccine to protect against common bovine pregnancy diseases and disorders. Pretty painless. They bawl and complain when you stick them with the needle, but that sort of pain is easily justified in the scheme of things.

We started up the propane torch to heat the irons and filled the vaccine guns. The three calves each got three shots, a fly-preventing ear tag, and a brand. In South Dakota, branding is the only state-regulated way of identifying cattle. Each owner registers a brand, the cost of which varies based in part on its simplicity and its location on the animal. Some locations keep more of the hide intact and rest over less-desirable cuts of meat--these increase sale value; others require several different 'pieces' to complete and thus slows down the branding process. I have had friends complain that such practices are inhumane or a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In a sense, they are right; these practices are inhumane, certainly inappropriate for human application. They are also correct that it is painful. I can only justify it by making reference to my basic presuppositions: animals are rightfully and ethically owned, sold, and traded; and owners have a right to protect their property. No perfectly effective alternative to branding has yet arisen that protects both these principles.

There was a movement toward an RFID system for cattle, swine, and poultry a couple years ago; it encountered strong opposition on two grounds: the increased bookkeeping and equipment costs and its inability to completely deter theft. RFID tags would be somehow inserted into the body of the animal, probably the ear, and so it is not even very difficult for someone after some free cattle to load them out of a field, take them home, and cut the RFIDs out of their ears.

In recounting how we castrate bull calves to someone I met recently, she said she didn't want to hear about it. I simply said that I simply wanted to explain to her the world we live in, the real world. Idealistically, she retorted that no world in which animals must be brutalized was the real world. Well, idealistically, sure. In an ideal world, there would be no theft, we would need no identifying marks on our property, and cows would only breed when we want them to with the cows we want them to. For another sense of the word "real," though, her world is very much not real. Maybe we should work harder to make those two worlds the same. That criticism I can understand. But it does no good to ignore the current truth of the situation; that is not how we move toward a more humane world for both people and animals. Where we are is not really up for debate; it must be recounted frankly and truthfully. After that, there are only two things that can be productively debated if we want to change the way things are: where we want to end up, and the way we should get there.

Those calves we branded today will not be irrevocably damaged by what happened to them today. The vast majority we emerge as calm, well-tempered steers and cows. Cows do no brood over pain the way people do; I would argue that they lack the self-reflective capability to really experience pain the way human beings do. As best as I can tell, this has been the case in my interaction with cattle over the years, but I'm sure many disagree. Many actively anthropomorphize animals and see that as a good thing. For me, though, my tendency is the opposite. Since we own and trade animals, I tend to want to emphasize the differences between them and people. Psychologically, it helps me deal with and live out the things we have to do with them to make a living.

Ellsworthian Dreams of Annihilation

When we were moving cows the other day, I was sitting on a neighbor's porch with the hired man and we saw a B-2 Stealth bomber make a graceful turn directly over the house we occupied. I remember saying, "That's not a sight people see every day, at least not to live to talk about." Though I am much more familiar with the predecessor of the B-2, the logically named B-1, such sights are not surprising in our area. My family's ranch is about 4 miles off the end of the runway of Ellsworth Air Force Base, the base that houses a fleet of the planes that did 90% of the bombing in Iraq. On stormy days like today, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between distant thunder and the afterburners of these "thunderbirds" as they lift off. They're running touch-and-go exercises right now, in fact. Whenever I see or hear them, I can't help but think of what these planes are designed to do, the death they entail.

Western South Dakota has long lived with the threat of military annihilation near at hand. During the Cold War, NIMBY principles established north-west South Dakota as the logical place to store over 150 functioning nuclear warheads. Though the warheads are now gone, the silos, like my dreams of their vast destructive power, remain. Not infrequently, I have dreams of nuclear destruction: Rapid City and the base in a mushroom cloud, we the bystanders left to watch and survive in the post-nuclear world. Equally vivid are dreams of a B-1 crashing in one of our fields. In these, this leviathan of the sky suddenly finds that the air will not support it, and it hurdles, slowly, reluctantly, but inevitably, toward the ground.

I would not describe such dreams as nightmares; though I am usually extremely nervous, it is never about fear of my own destruction. More accurately, I would describe my reaction as excitement: in the nuclear dreams, the excitement of a fresh start, knowing that whatever comes next is entirely new and untested, that I get to be there to see it unfold, and, above all, the knowledge that here, in this place, I have the resources to survive in such a world; in the crashing dreams, the excitement of having an event of worldwide significance take place here, in our very own backyard, to be the first human being to approach the wreckage, to look for survivors, but primarily, to know that finally, the eyes of the world will be pointed to this place and that for once, this place matters in the eyes of the world.

How much of these weird dreams are my own idiosyncratic personality is, in the end, irrelevant. I could not have them without this place, in these circumstances; at least to some extent, it is the place that has shaped the person that I am and not the other way around. And I am not the only thing that is different because of the military presence. Our dogs are terrified of thunder, but indifferent to B-1s. Our cows are amazingly docile even when a B-1 comes in for a landing no more than 1,000 feet up, louder than any Harley or NASCAR race.

The planes have changed all of us, affecting even my subconscious and sleeping thoughts. My dreams of their destruction are dreams of hope, hope in a return to a simple world where everything is once again important.

Pizza and the Internet

Growing up near Rapid City, it was uncommon for me to feel disconnected from the privileges of city life. Most of my friends were city kids. I went to movies in town. I even went to the only Catholic school in western South Dakota--for us a twenty minute drive that, for most other rural folk, would have been unthinkable. Some disadvantages that I can think of were merely economic; though farm and ranch people sit on incredible amounts of wealth, liquid assets and cash are usually pretty thin.

Others were strictly geographic. As a child, I would go to friends' birthday parties and the like, and it was always a thrill for me to have the pizza guy show up at the door after nothing but a phone call. When I would have friends on the farm, if there was pizza, it involved a lengthy trip to the joint--there is no such thing as rural pizza delivery. I've long speculated that this is the reason my parents always bought from the Schwan man. Ice cold goods delivered straight to your door! Though perhaps not appealing to the town family, it was a bi-weekly ritual that continues to this day. It's just too bad their Silver Mint Bars no longer come wrapped in silver-colored wrappers.

It is probably trivial to complain about pizza delivery. As far as disadvantages go, it's pretty pathetic. But the other disadvantage that I remember from my youth is one that stands in a chain of rural disadvantages: the wired disadvantages, the disadvantages of being off the grid. At the turn of the century, cities and towns quickly became electrified as local power plants operating on D.C. started to pop up. Lines connecting small towns cropped up and into these nearby farms could occasionally tap. But most rural people were well behind the curve, though. Rural electrification didn't really take off until 1933, when the New Deal appropriated substantial funds to bring electricity to the countryside. Much the same was the case with the telephone, though the infrastructure for electricity perhaps made that transition easier. Speaking historically, these were significant disadvantages. Electricity didn't come to my ranch until the late '40s. That's 40 summers of frequent trips to town for groceries or at least ice. 40 years of batter powered radios or no radio at all. 40 years of trips to town (or of delivery boys out of it) for the news quickly delivered by newspaper in town.

My mother recently said that these sorts of disadvantages are simply part of the territory; if you choose to live out here, this is what you get. Okay, sure. But two qualifications: no one, strictly speaking, gets to choose where they're born and raised; and urban residents need to consider the debt owed to rural people in general. I'll have more to say on the second one throughout the summer, I think. I'll let sleeping dogs lie for now.

Rural broadband is tricky, though. When President Obama mentioned it in his inaugural address, my first reaction was that he didn't know what he was talking about. The cost of such a vast project was unthinkable; we'd looked into it, and it ran several thousand dollars for an ethernet line to our home. Multiply that by several million and we have a huge, expensive project that, frankly, most people don't care about. I've heard whispers of it since then, but know little of its present likelihood. Given the federal economic situation, or at least the rhetoric around it, it seems unlikely to go forward any time soon. It would require something the scale of the New Deal all over again--and, for the time being, the time for new deals has passed.

Rural peoples are good at masking these disadvantages, though. Even if some technology could be beneficial, its practical unattainability makes it instead "superfluous"; "We're probably better off without it." Though we just got internet at home this last summer when my dad ran for county commissioner, we do have it now. It may not be broadband, but I'm not going to split hairs here. Things are changing; this is good.

But geographic disadvantages are deeper than we can see, sometimes. "Out of sight, out of mind" all too often characterizes implicit urban attitudes toward agriculture; all too many people don't care where food comes from, or how it is raised. As problematic as the "organic" movement can be, it does at least have the consequence of shedding some public attention on agriculture. This too is good, but in itself the organic movement is not and cannot be a solution to this geographic form of discrimination, if I can call it that. I guess that's in part what this blog is for, though: bringing the rural into the consciousness of the urban.

Life and Death on the Ranch

‎I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

-Melville, Moby Dick

I've encountered a good deal of death on the ranch, many instances of which make for disturbing stories and unsettling memories. A smattering of significant deaths: accidental decapitation of kitten; cow that accidentially bled out in the corral; the rotten horse in stagnant water; the dog got kicked in the head by a bull. It's never pleasant to encounter and rarely do people around me want to hear about it later. Anyone who knows me knows that that would never stop me, but more often than not, I don't tell these gruesome stories to gross people out. Talking about death is, for me, therapeutic. I helps me to put each specific death in context and reminds me of my own mortality. Most ranchers, I think, would understand this sentiment. As rough and tough as ranchers are, stories of life and death--both human and animal--are always near the surface. They are part of our cultural memory, and never something taboo. Unlike "city people," we cannot pretend to avoid death. And those of us who deal with it healthily, talk about it.

In addition to its status as part of our cultural vocabulary, talking about death serves another purpose: meaning-making. For the common or senseless or casual animal death, telling other people about it makes it seem less common, senseless, and casual.

Take the other day, for instance. My mother was walking up our (1/2 mile) driveway to get the mail, and the dogs were walking with her. They sniffed out a stray prairie dog, one that we call a "scout," looking for someplace to start up a new colony. One dog chased it until it fatigued, and the other picked it up in its mouth and ran with it back to the house. My mother later found it there. The dog hadn't finished it off, she had merely broken its spine so that it dragged its hind feet on the ground, lifeless. She told me it was out there, and I grabbed a gun, a .17 with a scope set for 50 meters or so. I sighted in, but made sure to aim well below to account for the proximity of the beast. The first shot almost certainly missed--I tried again. It didn't occur to me during this time that the humane, though more difficult, thing to do was to put the gun right up to its head; no missing, no time waiting to bleed out. It looked at me, seeming to plead for death. I obliged it, though it didn't die immediately. I was out of rounds, though, so just in case I had missed the second time, I went in the house and grabbed by .22 and fired a couple more times, though it was no longer moving at that point. My mother came and disposed of the remains. She later felt bad that she had done nothing to stop the dogs, but at the same time reminded herself and me that the animal is a pest and needed to be killed to prevent his friends from following.

The story itself is nothing. It's sad, meaningless, unstoppable in its progression from start to finish. As soon as it was discovered, the dog was going to die. But the recounting of the story, it's real relation to other human beings, gives that pathetic, broken, now-rotting creature a chance to live in memory. It means nothing to the prairie dog itself, but it does mean something to me.

The same could be said of any other of the other stories I could recount (don't worry, I won't, at least not now). Humans are meaning-making creatures, we thrive on our ability to make sense of the world around us. This claim need not be either an agnostic claim or a theistic one, but it can be either. Ranchers are storytellers, and in so doing, they experience and interpret the life and death around them, creating meaningful events where such meanings are not easily apparent.

Here is where the Melville quote at the beginning comes in. For ranchers, death is a meaningful event. They recognize and acknowledge its tragedy while shaping it in the context of their lives as a whole. Their attitude can seem nonchalant, even careless. In this way, the rancher can seem to be the "Fejee" of Melville's story. But the truth of the matter is deeper. The truth is that through such casual recollection of the end of various lives, ranchers acknowledge the power of death and yet assert their own power to control it by presenting a meaning for what is of itself wholly meaningless. Do "city people" thus acknowledge death? Do they recognize that their next (non-vegetarian) meal meant the end of another creature's existence? O civilized gourmand! Do you not know that your ribeye was earned at the cost of many stripes? That years of unthinking mowing were summed up at the point of an air-gun? That a heart bled and finally stopped forever on account of your insatiable appetite?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no "greeny weeny." But as wrong as the absolute equation of human and animal life is, the absolute subordination of animal life to any and every human use of it is perhaps worse. Augustine says that the world is to be used, not abused--and it most certainly can be abused. Each animal that passes through the doors of the slaughterhouse meets its end in meaningless pain, but that meaninglessness is changed into its opposite only if we dare to recall the story of those deceased creatures of God. It cannot rightfully pass into our stomach without first passing through our thoughts and--yes--even our prayers. If we respect that life by remembering its death, then perhaps we can hope to share in the light judgment that awaits Melville's Fejee at the end of time.

The Move

Cattle, too, are migratory animals. Like the bison of these plains, they flourish best when they move from place to place, following the grass as best they can. Of course, today those decisions are only marginally up to the herd; they go to whatever mile-by-mile section of land we find for them. Once they are moved to a new place, the herd instinctively spreads out, entering grazing patterns only advanced mathematicians can plot or make sense of. But I'm ahead of myself.

Right now, it's just after calving season, so the cows are still paired with their calves. When it comes to the move, this means making sure they stay paired up. Usually, this means no more than making sure no calves slip through the fence as we drive them down the road. This last week, though, that task was rendered all the more difficult by the fact that we were splitting the herd in two; because we rent most of the land we operate on, we often have to haul cattle in trailers from one far-flung pasture to the next. The pairs that were staying nearby had to remain with their calves; the ones that were being driven by truck had to stay with theirs.

These days, we drive our cattle on 4-wheelers. They can be dangerous, my mother often reminds me, but so can the horses which they replaced. In fact, it was a nearly-fatal equine accident involving my mother that brought about the shift to 4-wheelers in the first place. If I get the courage up one of these days, I might tell that story. Four-wheelers, in any case, require less work than horses. You don't have to saddle up a 4-wheeler and you don't have to feed it hay and oats, though both 4-wheelers and horses develop quirks in the way you have to ride them. The ride to the pasture is most certainly faster than it would be on horseback!

I am somewhat tempted to make the form and content of this post coincide, representing the monotony of the drive through the excruciating recollection of plodding bovine minutiae. I will resist this temptation to the best of my ability. We split the herd in two, 45 or 46 in one group and the rest in the other. It was my job to count "the rest" while the others sorted out a mistake we'd made. Counting cattle is not easy, especially when the herd is discombobulated during a move. Cows come to the slow but inevitable conclusion that their calf isn't at their side and make a dash to discover where it might have gone. When they aren't bawling after their young, they shift locations in their imperceptible yet unstoppable grazing expansion. I took up my post in the middle of the herd and spent at least a half-hour turning in slow circles, hand outstretched, trying to get a good count. 80...80...79(damn!)...80...82(what?)...78(what the hell!). No math major, masters program, or ph.d. seminar has taught me a good way count the herd.

While we were moving them, my dad got bored, and started collecting aluminum beer cans strewn alongside the road. This seemed uncharacteristic to me at first, as my father is anything but a "greeny-weeny." When I pointed this out to him, he retorted, "I'm making money." I started picking them up too, and I found one that had been left unopened--a Busch Light from over a year ago. Gross. Later on, there was a POP! and spray of white foam from amid the herd; one of them had stepped on another unopened can. I approached the location, and behold! another unopened can was right beside! They must have been really drunk.

The last two miles were uneventful, comparatively speaking. We stuck around a few minutes to make sure none of them were going to run back looking for a lost calf.

The day after or the next, we took the herd of 45 to load on trailers. There was one without a calf, number 11, and one with twins, number 202, so the number of cows and calves should have equaled out. It didn't; we had an extra calf. While they trucked the first loads, my father sent me and the hired man out to look for the missing cow. He told us to look west because the neighbor had cows there, and it must have gotten in with them--he couldn't bear to think that he'd actually made a mistake yesterday! Turns out we did; there was one cow from the moved herd looking very alone and with a very swollen utter to boot. We drove her back south and when they were reunited, that calf sucked the cow dry, to the cow's relief and the calf's eventual discomfort.

Number 202, though, she was a handful. Most cows are docile, and even most bulls aren't out to pick a fight with a human. 202, though, was what we call "ornery," a special kind of cow-bitch. I like to pride myself of being pretty brave when a cow's charging me; she might act all big and powerful, but if you hold your ground, she'll back off and turn aside. Usually, they're just testing you, seeing if you're confident. But every now and then, if you watch closely, you can see it in their eyes. They carry themselves differently. It's hard to describe, but in the 1 out of 100 cases when you see it, whatever it is, you get out of the way--she is going where she wants. And I had the misfortune of standing where 202 wanted to go that morning. I waved my stick, but she didn't stop; I yelled an apologetic, "she's going though!" as I ducked out of the way, to which it was quickly and semi (but only semi)-jokingly retorted, "well, if you let her!" I feared I had lost my touch, that these 9 months away from home had weakened me, made me forget how to sort cattle. I felt better when the same thing happened to another guy there about 10 minutes later. It wasn't just me! Whew! After the sorting was done, we gathered next to the fence with that cow-bitch and her twins on the other side as she pawed at the ground, lowered her head, and made feign to charge. From the safety of the fence, the other fellow she charged quipped, "I'd be ornery, too, if I had twins."