There is a time for loading

Spring is here. Don’t argue temperatures with me. There have been enough warm days and enough windy days to officially call it. And if that isn’t enough evidence for you, the kicker is that it is shipping time here on the High Plains.

Shipping time is the best of times in the winter wheat cattle business. It means the calves are not all dead, the wheat isn’t quite all gone, and you’ve hopefully found a buyer for all that beef on the hoof. It’s not an easy day, this day of bovine departure, but it is a day that you are more than happy to do.

It starts the moment you know when the trucks are going to be coming. Call your friends and family with pickups and proper experience and let them know at what early morning time and place the gathering will commence.

Next step, you consolidate the locations of the calves where possible.

You do a little low-impact re-arranging to get as many calves, in as few pastures, as near corrals, as accessible by semi-trucks, as possible.

You make sure the corrals are ready and equipped to hold the calves and to load them on trucks. If relevant, you balance the scales. If needed, you grade the roads and the place where the trucks will have to turn around.

Then, bright and early, you head to the place. The sun probably isn’t up, but it’s finally shipping day.

A convoy of pickups converge and report, ready to gather and sort and load, in return for coffee, scones, and a similar favor on their own shipping day. They scatter to the edges and back side of the pasture to get all the calves found and soon come together in a formation that looks practically planned out. But no formal training was actually involved, just years of knowing how this thing is properly done.

The moving wall of pickups moves the herd of calves to the corrals, and more often than you might imagine, the calves just go right on in. Plenty of times, there’s a break in the herd. A mad chase ensues by those most inclined and they eventually bring the strayed calves back in, albeit a bit more exercised.

Then they’re sorted and put into the groups of size that the truck-drivers will load. Then they’re gone.

The coffee and breakfast and conversation begins for all but the one who’s day this was. That coffee will be to go, for it’s off to the bank to pay off the note.

Audra Brown is one of the most inclined. Contact her at: [email protected]