At Waseca, on June 9, 2016, I have marked down a rain and wet period for three days. We have had nothing but hoar frost the last three days. This is a fearless prediction as the Big Guy had most of my predictions for 2015 wrong. I’m not sure if it is the Big Guy or Da Devil, but most of my hoar frost markings were not accurate last year. This year I will try to reform and only have accurate forecasts.
I need the sun, Big Guy. I don’t go south for the winter, so please bring back the sunlight. The days are short enough as the sun is setting before 4 p.m. Nine days before there starts to be longer days. Nice winter, so far.
On the home front, the bales are slowly moving out of my hills. At the current speed this will be a long process.
My son Ron is going around fixing corrals. I was thinking some of those corrals were built when I started farming, 45 to 50 years ago. They were built with treated posts and rough two by eights between the posts and one-inch-by-eight rough lumber nailed vertically, acting as a wind fence. They are starting to come apart as some of the boards are rotting. To pay farm bills back then, when there was no market for grain, I had a feedlot and bought calves. I fed them until spring and sold them for grasser calves. I liked running a feedlot. There’s great satisfaction in feeding calves, as you could see them growing and doing well. Unfortunately there was not a nickel in it. It was all right to use up your own grain, but as soon as you were buying calves and the feed for them the only person doing well was the banker. After about five years I stopped buying calves and grain sales improved.
Twenty years later, when son Ron got into farming, the corrals were still there, so we decided to feed calves again. We are slow learners. We built some more corrals. We bought 100 calves and the first year we made out OK. The second year we bought 200 calves and this time got a bunch of the large-eared variety. Those SOBs get off the truck and ,with ears dropping, I am sure they thought, “Oh no, momma’s gone. We are going to die.” They go over to a corner of the corral and lie down and try to die. A little black one gets off the truck and says, “Oh no, momma’s gone. I better get something to eat” and goes over to the feed bunk and fills up. We treated every one of those droopy eared SOBs and lost half a dozen. The survivors did well.
You know you are in a funk when whatever you do goes south. Got talked into putting them into a pre-sort sale. I have never been so mad in my life. Our cattle came into the ring covered with shit. At home we made sure that the cattle had lots of bedding and our cattle were clean, no tags. Mixed in with our cattle were fat little lard bellies. The buyers don’t want to pay as much for these calves, because as soon as they are on grass they lose 50 pounds of fat. I realized these guys running the yard were not cattlemen, as I think the cattle were sorted by whatever cattle fit under a stick at a certain height. The sale was terrible. When the smoke cleared, we had lost $937. I told son Ron that we could play recreational hockey all winter and we could not drink $937. So that’s what we did. We still had our own cattle, but we did not buy feeders, anymore.
Joke of the week: The teacher was teaching social studies and was discussing the recent election. The teacher asked the class how many liked Justin Trudeau. Everyone put up their hand but little Johnny. The teacher was looking at Johnny when he said, “My grandparents were born conservative, my mother and dad were born conservative, so I am a conservative, too.” The teacher didn’t like that answer, so she said to Johnny, “If your mother was mentally handicapped and your father was a moron, what would you be?” Quick as a whip little Johnny said, “Well, then I would be a Trudeau supporter.”
