Welcome to the Ranch!

At the 2013 Grimes County Fair, Jake DeHaven competed with two friends in team penning and team sorting events. Unlike speed events like barrel racing, these events are a test of true working cowboy skills on horseback. In fact, the event was created to enable cowboys to showcase their horsemanship skills. Because one of the boys on the team is sixteen years old, they had to compete in the senior division.

In team penning, the contestants are given a number announced over the loudspeaker as the time begins. The number corresponds to three calves in a herd of thirty. They are to sort the three calves out and pen them in a small pen at the opposite end of the arena. The fastest time wins. Deductions are made if any other calves cross the sorting line. It is harder to do than to describe in writing.

In team sorting, the contestants are also given a number as the time begins. It is similar to team penning, as they have to cut the calf with the said number out. Then they have to go in numerical order and cut out the remaining cattle. For example, if the judge called #5. Then they would remove #5 and then 1,2,3, and 4 in order. The fastest time wins with deductions given for mistakes in the order.

This was Jake’s first time to compete in either event. It was a joy to see him out there giving it his best effort. There are so many factors in a successful run. The cowboy has to be focused and paying attention. He/she has to have a reliable horse with cow sense. Together they make up one team. Then add two more riders and their horses and the teamwork needed increases.

We are proud of Jake and the other members of his team. They brought home the 3rd place prize in the Senior Division for both events. Regardless of the prize, they gained valuable experience that can only translate into better horsemanship skills on the ranch. At home or in the arena, Jake can do real cowboy work.

As most of you know, my children are members of the Grimes County Jr. Deputy Sheriff’s Mounted Posse. This past weekend they capped off their year of appearances, parades, and rides by performing as the pre-rodeo entertainment of the Grimes County Fair Rodeo.

My youngest two boys, Isaac and Andrew, want to be full-blown members of the Posse so bad. They can ride, but they are not ready to navigate the arena with other horses in a pattern at a lope with a large crowd watching on one side. Added to that, there are rodeo horses and bulls waiting impatiently in shoots on the other side of the arena. Not exactly ideal circumstances for my six and five year old boys.

Knowing this the coordinator of the Posse, Shalla Roesler, and the Drillmaster, Emily Hibner, decided to include the boys at the beginning of the performance. Isaac rode Ladd, my dad’s 34 year old retired cow horse, with another young child, Peyton Ojeda, sandwiched between Andrew in the back. After they were introduced to the audience and waved, Isaac kicked Ladd into a trot and left the arena.

Peyton and Andrew were in the back on a tandem saddle that is not attached very securely. It just attaches at the front. As Ladd trotted, the two boys in the back were being bounced high with every step. The sheer cuteness of the uniformed boys bouncing high in the saddle thrilled the audience. The Sheriff has received countless requests for a photograph of our three mascots.

Sadly, I don’t have one myself. However, I am hoping that the professional photographer got some good shots of them. Tonight at the Premium Sale, she will have them for sale. I just need to get there soon enough to insure that I get a copy before they sell out.

If I get one, I will post it on this article. If not, you’ll just have to use your imagination. For me and my family, the memory of the boys playing their part in the Posse performance was priceless. Even though the Posse performed well both Saturday and Sunday night, the boys were the hit of the rodeo.

We were enjoying a pretty mild winter and extended spring season for Texas. We had no snow and actually had cool fronts throughout April. When summer decided to begin, it did not do it gradually. Instead it said, “Bam, it’s hot!”

How hot? Hot enough to send your family to the pond in order to cool off only to find the “pool” is already full. We were surprised to see so many of our mama cows soaking in the pond. Occasionally you will see one or two, but someone threw a pool party and forgot to invite us.

Cattle have sweat glands in their noses. As the heat rises, you will see beads of perspiration between their nostrils. Cows usually only drink twice a day, but they can drink anywhere from 7.5-10 gallons each time.

These cows were actually coming to the pond for a drink, but found themselves venturing further and further into the cool water. Some people ask us if cows can swim. Yes, they can. Cowboys drove them across wide rivers on cattle drives not that long ago. But from my observations, cattle prefer to soak in the water while keeping their feet planted on the bottom of the pond.

I know this is a little silly, but we were tickled to find so many cows in the pond at one time. I could not help but imagine their thoughts or conversation as if they were gossiping about ranch life. I would welcome any suggestions for a caption for either photo. Leave a comment below or email me directly at lndehaven@aol.com. If I get one that is really good, I will share it with you in the near future.

Last Saturday many from my family and some friends went fishing at our big lake on the new ranch. My eleven year old son, Jake, and an adult family friend decided to go fishing in the rowboat together, which was not a good idea. The boat was not big enough for the two of them.

At first things seemed fine, they rowed out to the middle of the lake with a large expanse of water separating them from the safety of the banks on all sides. As the friend cast out his line, he lost his balance. Jake attempted to correct the momentum of the boat as it rocked far to one side by leaning in the opposite direction. His boat companion tried to regain the boat’s balance by standing up (not a good idea). Jake bailed just in time before the side of the boat smacked the side of his head or landed on top of him.

Jake found himself in the cold water in the middle of the lake fully clothed including his brand-new cowboy boots, which he had just received for his birthday. He can swim, but he has never had to swim so far especially encumbered by so much clothing and footwear.

After making sure that each of them were not hurt, they tried locating the fishing poles and oars. Together they tried to drag the boat with them, but after about fifteen minutes they decided to abandon ship. Both were becoming tired.

Meanwhile, my dad jumped into the lake and began swimming toward the wet fishermen. He is an excellent swimmer and with good presence of mind removed his phone, boots, shirt, etc. before plunging into the cold water. He reached them about the time they decided to just swim to shore without the added burden of the boat. Daddy was surprised to turn around and see his faithful companion, Lily, a dog who does not normally swim, paddling up behind him.

Now there are two men, one boy, and a dog in the lake and at this point all of them are tired. Lily tried to rest by climbing up my dad’s back. Her claws scratched his back badly and he began bleeding. I sure am glad that we do not have sharks or piranha in the lake because they would be in really bad shape at this point.

Thank God, they all made it back onto shore safely. They climbed into chairs deep back in the shade under some trees to rest.

My daughter, Grandma, and the friend’s mother had left to run a short errand on the ranch only to return and see an empty lake with a boat standing straight up in the air and oars floating on top of the water. Panic set in immediately.

It did not take long for the two groups to meet and relief to soothe the fears of both parties. Jake’s boots dried out and he conditioned them well so he should be able to enjoy his birthday present for awhile. It might not have been his actual birthday, but it was definitely a surprise swimming party that we hope will not be repeated.

We have had some excitement on the ranch in the past week. First we have gotten some much needed rain. Storm systems came through dropping good rain for a few days in a row. We have not had flooding like Houston or the tornadoes which occurred in northern Texas yesterday, for which we are very thankful. We still pray that God will continue to bless our land with rain throughout the summer.

Last Sunday a week ago, my youngest son, Andrew, grew ill. We thought he had contracted a stomach virus, but something about it seemed odd. In order to make a long story short as well as spare you the details, early Monday morning it became apparent that he needed medical attention. My husband and I drove to the nearest good medical hospital, which for us is in College Station.

Andrew received excellent care and had to endure an emergency appendectomy. After a total of three days in the hospital, we were released to come home. He is still recovering from the surgery, but is doing much better.

The challenging part will be to keep him from getting hurt for six whole weeks. Boys will be boys and we discussed no wooden sword fights, no trampoline, no wrestling, etc. Instead, we have been entertaining Andrew with playdough, Uno, Legos, go fish, puzzles, etc.

After dinner on one of our first nights home, we went on a slow walk through the pasture after a light rain. We ate our weight in dewberries for dessert. It was such a blissful evening. We delighted in the normal scenery. There were the horses grazing in green pastures. There were the cows in belly high grass. There are fish jumping in the lake. We were home!

We are so thankful for the rain and the health of Andrew. We caught the appendix in time before it ruptured. He is getting better each day. As I researched all there is to know about the appendix, I am also thankful that cows do not have them. That would really put a different spin on herd health management. It was hard enough to get a five-year old to articulate what he was feeling. I cannot even imagine having to monitor appendicitis in cattle.

Please pray for Andrew’s continued recovery and for rain to continue to replenish the soil in all the drought stricken areas of the United States. God does listen.

Let’s face it, there are good mothers and bad mothers in this world. Some mothers are born and mothering skills come as naturally as breathing. Some females are transformed into great mothers as experience shapes them. Occasionally you will stumble on a mother who is so self-absorbed that they have no desire to care for their offspring. As I have observed animals throughout my life, I have been able to find all three types of mothers in cattle.

You will notice a certain heifer who hangs out with the younger calves. You will catch her loving and licking a smaller calf, usually her younger sister or brother. Caring for the young seems to be a part of her. As time passes and she has her own calf, she is a stellar mother.

Even though she knows and trusts you, she becomes very protective of her calf and won’t let you near it. She keeps it clean and safe. She feeds it and spends time with it. Where the mother is, the baby is not far off. She is not a typical cow, but the type of cow ranchers want.

When most cows have their first calf, they seem overwhelmed and unsure of what is expected of them. Innately they know to clean up their calf immediately after birth. They know to let it nurse as soon as it stands in order to deliver the life-giving colostrum. However, they seem unsure of themselves. They lack the confidence. They begin to clean up their calf, but get tired or distracted before they are finished. The calf goes to suck, but the nipples are tender. So she pushes the calf away.

Ranchers have to patient with this type of mother. You come in and help her finish cleaning the calf. Sometimes you have to restrain the cow to permit the calf to nurse. The good news is that usually this intervention is enough and the mother learns from this experience. Over time, she learns to be a great mother.

Rarely, you will have a cow who for whatever reason abandons her calf. We do not tolerate this at Cross Creek Cattle Company. We sell the animal. One cow had a really hard birth and abandoned her calf. We took it home and raised her ourselves. It was a good experience for our children, but not ideal in the least from a ranching perspective.

Fortunately, this does not happen very often in the Beefmaster breed. They are known to be not only fertile, but good mothers. Beefmasters are a cross between Brahamans, Herefords, and Shorthorns. The latter are known not only for their milk production, but also for great mothering skills.

Regardless of whether your mom was a natural or whether she had to acquire the skills needed to be a good mom, don’t forget her this Sunday. Show her how much you appreciate what she has done for you. For all the mom’s out there who are reading this, “Happy Mother’s Day!” from all of us at Cross Creek Cattle Company. We know the value of great mothers.

My husband and I will celebrate our wedding anniversary soon and we want to go on a weekend getaway. I began searching for ideas of places to go. We don’t want to use most our weekend traveling so our destination needs to be relatively close. As I scoured the internet searching everything from fancy hotels to bed and breakfasts, I ran across one place not but an hour away.

It is a bed and breakfast on a ranch. Some of the amenities listed free of charge were things like hiking through trails, sitting on a porch swing, and fishing. Other amenities that they charged extra were horseback rides, picnic lunch by the lake, and a ranch tour. I added up the costs for a weekend stay and was taken aback. Wow!!

I never thought of my life as a vacation. The thought of that is actually funny. I guess because I know first-hand all of the work that goes on behind the scenes. However, the thought that I live in an amenity-filled world made me stop and get some perspective. I have written many times how lucky we are to live on Cross Creek Cattle Company; it is not a new realization, but do I wake up each morning knowing how blessed we are?

Regardless of where you live, we can easily take for granted our circumstances, our health, our family, etc. We don’t count our many blessings one by one. We get bogged down in the routine. Seeing that people will pay big money to enjoy the pleasures of living on a ranch made me once again remember how lucky we are. We get so busy that we forget to take advantage of our surroundings. Take a walk, smell the proverbial roses, pick dewberries and wildflowers, pack a picnic lunch, go fishing. Enjoy your life; don’t just go through the motions.

I tell my children all the time “live a life of gratitude.” Be thankful and content in all circumstances. It is easier said than done. But as the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 4, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances…” He reminds us that it is a learned skill; it is not innate.

Today I challenge you to look around your home whether it be a tiny yard in the suburbs or a small apartment in the heart of a city. Find something for which to be grateful. Make a list. Think about the tourists clambering to have a taste of your life. Then we will all realize how good we have it.

Set back on a beautiful meadow covered at this time of year with colorful wildflowers on our new ranch is an old, red bunkhouse and a white outbuilding. Upon their discovery, we were initially hoping to repair the buildings, but termites, rot, and other reasons have changed our minds. Both are too far gone and need to be torn down.

Around the buildings stand a mixture of sprawling hardwoods and straight-backed pine trees. Their tops sway in the almost constant springtime breeze. It is quite picturesque; however, the drought has killed many of these trees and instead of green leaves, you only see bare limbs or the dusky red color of dried needles. The wind has already toppled several trees, but some still remain as standing corpses marring the view.

On one of the standing dead pines, an employee of Cross Creek Cattle Company was sawing away with a chainsaw to safely bring down the giant. Bits of sawdust kept hitting his arms and legs and the hum of the saw drowned out any other sounds. He kept attacking the trunk hoping to see signs of it falling when something diverted his attention.

Maybe it was the size of the “sawdust” hitting his limbs or maybe it was a sixth sense warning of danger. Whatever it was, he drew his eyes away from the tree and down to his legs. He was standing in the middle of a cloud of bees! They were swarming around his legs and body striking at his denim-clad legs. He did the only thing he could do–he ran!

Luckily, the bees were not aggressive. They did not follow him on his race out of the woods. In fact, he was not stung once, which is amazing considering the circumstances. We later found out that this employee is allergic to bees.
We are an awful long way from an emergency room, especially for anaphylactic shock. He is now required to have Benadryl or an epi-pen on hand.

Having seen the flight out of the woods with chainsaw in hand, my husband climbed down from the tractor to see what was happening. During the excitement, the bees had gone back to their undiscovered hive. Worried about the unfelled dead pine, my husband decided to knock it down with the help of a large tractor. On his way to the tree trunk, he looked over in the direction of the white outbuilding. From a hole in the side of the exterior wall, a mass of bees were forming a black cloud and moving toward him. Needless to say, he got out of there as fast as he could.

My husband called a local bee man, who comes out free of charge. He identified them as honey bees. He thought they were domesticated and had obviously been worked with before. As it it too early in the season, honey was not ready, but they had filled the wall with a hive.

They will have to find another place to call home as the outbuilding needs to come down, but until then caution and prevention will have to suffice. Nonetheless, it was an eventful day on the ranch.

Learning how to cook grass fed beef takes practice. It really involves understanding time and temperature differences from traditional cooking. Against the advice of many, you do not have to treat grass fed beef with kid gloves nor do you have to marinate everything for 24 hours. We give our customers “6 Cooking Tips for Grass Fed Beef,” which comes from an article on this blog with the same title.

Still, I get questions specifically pertaining to grilling steaks. I found this short video with very simple instructions and ingredients from Whole Foods. I liked it because it was so simple and the video does not spend the whole time extolling all the virtues of eating grass fed beef.

Instead it focuses on the how-to of grilling grass fed steaks, which is what our customers want. They already know why they have purchased the grass fed beef. Take just over one minute to watch a tutorial showing you a simple method of grilling.

Yesterday and today we have been blessed with much needed rain. However, we are already feeling the unfortunate, all-to-familiar symptoms of drought. Our land has not fully recovered from our exceptional drought in 2011.

For a time, we were gifted with much needed rain to the point that people were starting to grumble about the mud and overcast skies. It was good, but then the winds came. They blew constantly, sometimes in 30 mph gusts, sometimes as a calm zephyr, but the result was dry ground.

The silver lining is that there was enough rain and time for grass to grow in order to secure the topsoil. Otherwise we might have been looking at conditions similar to the historic Dust Bowl. This would have been catastrophic to the farming and ranching community.

Thankfully, we have green grass standing in the pastures. Wildflowers are filling the meadows and roadsides. Deciduous trees have unfurled their fresh, new leaves. On the surface, things look great. In fact, everything looks beautiful until you look a little closer.

The first sign of drought would be the lower than normal ponds. We just have not had sufficient run-off to fill them. When it rains, the ground soaks up the moisture like a sponge. At some point, the ground should have suitable moisture to allow for run-off, which leads us to the second sign of drought.

Looking beneath the roots of the green grass, cracks are forming on the top of the soil. Beneath our topsoil lies red clay. Clay minerals are notorious for absorbing large quantities of water, which causes the ground to swell. In dry times, the moisture evaporates or is used by the plant life leaving the clay to shrink in volume.

If you are a visual person, think of the clay acting in much the same way as a sponge. As the clay shrinks, surface cracks appear due to the expansion and contraction. Cracks signal the ground beneath the surface is dry, which signals drought.

I looked on the Drought Monitor today to see if my observations were correct. Unfortunately, they are. Grimes County is labeled “severe drought.” Extreme drought is knocking on our door; it is already to an adjoining county. Looking at a map of the United States, the entire mid-section is suffering from some type of drought.

My husband went to a Beef Cattle Short Course at Texas A&M University. Climatologists warned the attendees that we were still in a drought cycle regardless of our rainfall for another several years. Nobody wanted to believe it, but here we are looking at more tough times. We aren’t ones to duck our heads and ignore our surroundings. It is not out of fear that I write this; it is just an honest look at our dry conditions.