Author’s note: This blog is about a real cow – “Old Number 5” – on my family’s ranch northwest of Kaycee, Wyoming. While the cow’s “thoughts”and feelings are obviously conjecture, the day-to-day activities and movements of this cow are real. We will follow her throughout the year to all of the pastures she grazes, and she will give her “opinions” about all of them and the happenings within her herd. My family and I expend a lot of time, energy, and resources to make sure the cattle have plenty to eat, fresh, clean water to drink, and are, for lack of a better phrase, Happy Cows. Please keep in mind that my intentions for this blog are not to “humanize” cows – or any other animal – but merely to provide a look into what a typical cow here at Brock Livestock Company goes through in a given year, and her possible “opinions” about things.
We finally got our first taste of winter this month; I say finally because our first real snow didn’t come until the end of October, which is unusually late for us in Wyoming. It was only a few inches, but it did serve as a reminder for all of us that colder weather is just around the corner! But I am getting ahead of myself; because we had wonderful weather through much of October, and I can’t think of a better place my herdmates and I could have spent the month than on the mountain here at Brock Livestock Company. Toward the middle of the month, our ranchers opened a gate and moved us again to a different mountain pasture. This pasture is mostly along the foot of the mountain, and it extends about halfway up the slope of the mountain. It is a little closer to the “flatlands” – the pastures where my herdmates and I will spend the winter. Once again, we had lots of grass thanks to the moisture last spring, and our drinking water comes from mountain springs, which are fed into tanks for us.
The weather has slowly been cooling off for us, and as I mentioned earlier, we got a very late first snowstorm towards the end of the month. We don’t mind the snow much at all; in fact we cows like this cooler fall weather. When you wear a leather coat all day every day, you quickly learn to appreciate these beautiful fall days!
Our calves are getting more and more independent every day, and mine is no exception. She still gets some milk from me, but her diet mostly consists of native Wyoming grass. I am trying to teach her everything she needs to know about how to be a cow – how to find a good spot to hunker down when the Wyoming wind gets to howling; which kinds of grasses are the most nutritious for us and where to find them; even things like how to know when a predator is in the area and how to treat our ranchers and other cattle in the herd. She is a good student – much better than I was for my momma when I was her age growing up in these very same pastures.
-Jason Williams, Brock Livestock (Jason is one of the valued partner ranchers raising cattle for Tallgrass)
