A Day In The Life of a Ranch Hand During Calving Season: Part I – Night Checks

11:50 PM: I groan as I roll over to shut off the alarm on my phone, playing music way too cheery for this tired young lady after only 2 hours of sleep. I rub my tired eyes as I sit up out of my warm bed, exposing my bare arms to the cold air that fills the room from the cracked window. I quickly bear crawl around the room, grabbing the barn clothes I left out just for moments like this. When I’m fully dressed in sweatpants, sweatshirt, Carhart jacket, stocking cap, gloves, and my all-important Muck Boots, I grab my flash light, bracing myself for the cold that awaits, I close my eyes behind my glasses and head outside to the barn next door.

12:00 AM: I walk into the corral to find the heifers all comfortably laying down in the clean straw. Careful to not wake them, I walk around the edge of the corral, checking to see if anyone has started labor. Most night checks, I simply find sleeping heifers, but tonight, I hear grunting coming from inside the barn. As I head inside, I spot a heifer lying on her side with two little feet coming out of her. Since I have seen both front feet and they are coming out pointing up, I know all is good so far. I head back into the house and will check on her in thirty minutes.

12:30 AM: As I am walking up to the barn, I hear a low bawl and I know that she has calved because she must be talking to her baby, it’s a different kind of bawl than normal. I walk in and see the heifer standing over her baby, licking it clean and talking to it. All is in order and Mom is doing her job, so I leave them to be until the next check in an hour and a half.

The night goes on like this for the next 7 hours, someone checking every two hours between my fiancé and I. We have been doing this now for a month and a half, but oddly enough, even though we are tired, there is still nothing more precious than a happy, healthy calf, wobbling over to mom to get its first milk. We love what we do and I’m not sharing a day in the life of a ranch hand to get your sympathy, I just think it is important to share our story and let people understand what happens on farms and ranches, day in and day out. Then all my friends back in the Twin Cities and beyond can see what it means to live on a ranch in McLaughlin, SD.

Rain Man's Story

           The first time we met the calf we affectionately named Rain Man, we thought he was dead. Nick, my fiancé, and I were out checking the heifers and we heard a cow bawling as loud as she could. When we got to her, we found her laying down next to what looked to be a dead calf, but Rain Man wasn’t giving up that easy. Since, 1560, his mom, was not too keen on letting us take her baby boy to the shower, we had to climb one fence, scoot under two barbed wire fences, and open one gate, while running to the shower, where we take care of new born calves that need help.

            Nick laid him down on the black rubber floor of the shower and we thought we were losing him. His eyes kept rolling back into his head. He could not easily straighten his neck nor pick up his head, all while his legs were twitching uncontrollably and his body constantly shivered. Nick started to shower him with warm water to warm him up, while I immediately administered 5 ccs of Dexamethasone, a corticosteroid we give to newborn calves to help reduce swelling and stress caused by a difficult calving, into Rain Man’s neck.

            Nothing changed for thirty minutes.

But then the Dexamethasone kicked in and he started to feel better and could actually hold his head up. Before we knew it, our lost cause calf had finished a 2-quart bottle of colostrum, the first milk produced by a calf’s mom that gives the calf their immune system, but we gave him artificial colostrum because as it turns out Rain Man’s mom did not start producing milk, we are not really sure the cause of this.

A few hours later, Rain Man was back with his mom in the barn sitting up and looking good. We believe the reason he was in such bad shape when we found him was because he had brain damage, either from being oxygen deprived or maybe because he was kicked by him mom, we do not know the exact cause.

A day later, Rain Man was looking great. We were bottle-feeding him since his mom still had no milk, but he was eating like a champ. However, on the third day, something changed. He wouldn’t eat his bottle and he was back to shivering. We brought him into the shower room and turned on the heat. We tried every trick we had in our hat, but 48 hours after we thought we’d saved him, we lost him.

            I cried. We lost a cow unexpectedly the day before and then we lost our miracle calf. It was just a few tears until I had to look 1560 in the eyes as she was running around looking for her calf, knowing he was never coming back. These are the days that make working a desk job not look so bad, but I know I’m where God wants me to be and now Rain Man is too.

One Love, One Passion, Every Day

            “I don’t have a heart of steel,” my fiancé, Nick, said to me as we carried a stillborn calf out of the pen. I had been thinking the same thing, but I just wanted to put the calf where it belonged and keep working, not thinking about the sad situation. Later that same day I watched as he carried a beautiful, healthy, little calf inside to clean and warm her up. We bathed her, fed her, got her on her feet, and back with her mom in just a couple hours. Watching him smile as she started to get feisty and we knew she was going to be okay, made my heart so happy. There’s no faster way to a farm girl’s heart than through the cows.

Nick and I with the new mama and baby.

            The first time we danced together almost three years ago, he told me that his dream was to have thousands of cows some day. I was smitten from that moment on. There is nothing more precious than being able to look into your partner’s eyes and know that the same fire that fuels your soul, burns inside of them as well. I thank God every day that he gave me a man to work side by side with, day in and day out, growing our passions together in support of our common goal to one day have our own farm and feed the world one happy cow and healthy field at a time.

These Great Creatures

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are being chased by something and you are running as fast as you can, but you are not going anywhere? Have you ever had this happen in real life? Unfortunately, about two weeks ago, I did.

I have not told many people because, initially, I was embarrassed that after all these years of working with cattle that I let it happen to me. But there has been this festering inside of me, this irrational fear that is trying to make its way to the surface and I feel as though if I get it out, I can feel truly myself again. I also feel that God saved me on that cold day to teach me a lesson and to share it; that these great creatures we love are exactly that, creatures.

This is not the bull from the incident, but another one on the farm.

So now I’ll get to the story.

About two weeks ago, I went and rode my horse, Dusty. In order to get to the pen that he stays in, I have to walk through a pen of 47 heifers and 20 some bulls. That day there was an old Charolais bull standing in front of Dusty’s pen. He looked like he didn’t feel well and paid no attention to me as I walked by him three or four times getting things for Dusty.

About an hour later, I was asked to go check on a bull that was in rough shape the night before. I figured it was the bull that had been by Dusty, but I headed out to the pen to double check and report back my thoughts. He had gone around the other side of the barn in the meantime, however. As I walked the length of the barn, I talked to him, making sure I was not going to scare him as I rounded the corner. Before I got there, I did as I had been taught when working with bulls, I mapped out an escape route if he were to charge, but I made a critical error when sculpting this plan, I misjudged the depth of the snow.

I didn’t want to make a sharp turn around the corner, so I circled out wide and continued to talk. I said, “hey there big guy” as I turned the corner to see his rear end facing me. He quickly swung around with his head in the air and this is when I knew I was in trouble. I turned to go to the nearest fence, but the snow was about three feet deep and my running got me nowhere, eventually causing me to lose my footing. Thankfully, he targeted my standing body and had no time to adjust when I fell on top of the snow, so he only ran over the bottom part of my legs. Also, thankfully, he had misjudged the snow as well and went flying face first into a large pile of snow. As I saw his body disappear into a white cloud, I knew if was my time to run. I sprinted to the gate, making it safely to the other side.

I stood there crying out of fear and pain, shaking with adrenaline. My fiancé came rushing over with a confused look on his face, not knowing what had happened. I looked at him and said between gasps, “the snow saved my life.” Yes, if the snow had not been there I may have made it to the fence, but I also may have not been fast enough. But because of the snow, he would have hit my entire body, not just my legs. If there had not been snow to cushion the blow, he might have broken my leg against the hard ground, but instead I am just bruised and swollen (still bruised to this day and applying muscle cream each night, but that’s better than a cast). Without the snow, he might have had the energy to come back at me. I was not alone out there that day; my guardian angel definitely was busy.

So as comfortable as we get with these beautiful beasts, please don’t ever get too comfortable. We work in one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but most of us have been doing it our entire lives, so we sometimes forget the dangers. Just remember, I walked past this bull three or four times before this incident and he didn’t even bat an eye at me. We need not be afraid, but always aware.

Phenomenal Woman

“I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me.”

These words sang from my lips as I performed "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou for my talent for Miss Brookings 2015. I believed every word I said that night, that I was indeed a woman, Phenomenally, but as the past two years have worn on I have come to question what it means to be a woman in 2017, especially in agriculture.

There have been days where I have picked up the 95-pound calf and put him in the trailer because I was told that the 50-pound calf was too heavy for me. There have been days were my unqualified, uneducated, less passionate, underperforming male counterparts have been offered the job instead of myself. There have been days where my thoughts were occupied by sexual harassment comments by farm co-workers instead of on the cow I was breeding. There have been days where I have wanted to throw in the towel.

But then I remember the days where I outperformed every man around me, the days where I saved the calf, the days when the entire cow herd follows me because they trust me, the days when my heart sings with joy because my sick cow is no longer knocking on deaths door, the days that I know I am doing what God has put me on this earth to do.

So yes, “I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me.” And you can bet that we will still face challenges as we fight for equality and not every man will see us as equal, but we cannot let someone else’s opinion of us stop us from achieving our dreams. Like Ayn Rand said “the question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.”