raising four kids on the corporate cow ranch that's always been my home
PV 8/18/21
Smoke, dust, and replacement heifers. The smoke: It’s very real in our part of the Yellowstone Valley this season, rolling in from fires near Ashland and Hardin and probably even all the way from California, settling in for days at a time and blotting out the sun. The dust: Worse than usual this year because of the drought and stirred up right now because the crew that annually cleans the manure out of the feedlot is here, working away, scraping feedlot pens down to the dirt and hauling a year’s accumulation of fertilizer to the nearby fields that grow the feed for the feedlot. (Their equipment is to the right in the photo.) The replacement heifers: Born in 2020 and the cream of the crop, these gals have been selected to grow into mama cows (rather than finish as meat animals). On a normal year the PV replacement heifers summer out in the hills on grass, but this year’s group never got to the leave the feedlot and instead was exposed to bulls right here in the pens. The original idea was to keep the heifers in the feedlot all summer to save the grass that they would usually eat for the older mama cows (the drought has left us and everyone scrambling for feed for all the critters). But then the three pastures where the replacement heifers usually summer burned up anyway… in a lightning-started fire in early July. So no one will be eating that grass this year, and we are thankful these heifers weren’t in those pastures when the fire roared through.
We have been trying to keep up with the fire situation in the west. It’s horrible and we have had you all in our prayers.
I have missed reading your newsy epistles and am glad to hear from you again.
Many blessings, my friend. Greet Beau abs your family for me!
montanamama.me 
We have been trying to keep up with the fire situation in the west. It’s horrible and we have had you all in our prayers.
I have missed reading your newsy epistles and am glad to hear from you again.
Many blessings, my friend. Greet Beau abs your family for me!
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We are having that eerie smokey twilight here in SE Idaho too.
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