Welcome to the Ranch!

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.

I field lots and lots of questions about our grass fed beef, but many people we talk to have almost as many questions about wild hog. These wild animals are a relatively recent problem. Growing up we did not have feral hogs in our area. They stayed up in the northern part of our county, but had not ventured into our pastures and woods. As an adult, the feral hog population has undoubtedly migrated south to Cross Creek Cattle Company.

For the past decade, these animals have plagued our land as they plow up pastures in a single night. They multiply at alarming rates and mature very quickly. Wild hogs can also be very aggressive, especially sows protecting their babies. Therefore, they are a problem for many reasons.

Popular shows portray hunters with bows and arrows or armed only with a large knife. You can kill hogs this way; however, hunting them in the aforementioned way takes time, patience, and puts you in more dangerous situations. Hogs are not our livelihood. Instead they threaten the grasses that feed our livelihood. We have to try to control their population, and we do it as safely as we can. We trap.

Last week my son, Jake, killed a really nice sized hog and dressed it out all by himself. We were planning to go on a family camping trip on Easter weekend and he suggested that we roast his hog in a hand dug pit. In my desire to encourage productive ideas in my children, I agreed. So my husband and Jake did a little research on the subject.

Before we left to go camping, Jake seasoned his porker to his liking and wrapped it in heavy duty foil several times. It barely fit in our large cooler, but we were able to close the lid.

After we pitched our tents, Lane and Jake set out with shovels and post hole diggers and began chopping at the hard earth. They ended up with a pit 2.5′ deep, 4′ long, and 3′ wide. It was big enough to leave a one foot perimeter around the hog.

Then they cut up a fallen post oak tree. Filled the pit and set in on fire. After it roared for hours and roasted hot dogs in three seconds flat, it burned down leaving red hot coals a foot deep. My husband took a simple, metal grate that stands on short legs and turned it upside down. He laid the wrapped hog on top of it and carefully lowered the hog into place. Luckily he did not singe the hair on his arms; although, the intense heat made him suspect it at the time.

The laid pieces of old tin on top of the pit and covered them making sure that no smoke was escaping. The point was to ensure oxygen was not feeding the coals. We did not want scorched and blackened pork; we wanted succulent, juicy pork. And that is what we found 13 hours later when we pulled the foil back.

It was by far the best wild pork we have ever eaten. We had enough food for a small army. We have eaten pulled pork with baked potatoes, pulled pork sandwiches with barbecue sauce, chopped pork as soft tacos, etc. We have eaten well off the fat of the land in true pit barbecue fashion.

Even though we only offer grass fed beef to the public, living on Cross Creek Cattle Company affords us the opportunity to raise many different animals for our family’s consumption and/or enjoyment. One of the foods that we are enjoying in abundance are eggs.

We have different breeds of chickens. Most lay brown eggs. One kind lays white eggs. And, one breed lays pastel color eggs, usually pale green. The latter are Ameracaunas, which are also called the “Easter Egg” chicken for obvious reasons. My little boys love to eat “green eggs” and ham for breakfast.

We also have Muscovy ducks. Their eggs are off-white in color and bigger than chicken eggs. Our ducks have just begun to lay consistently. They lay in a different place and they are open to a much bigger area than our chickens. So it is like an Easter egg hunt every morning.

We own one turkey. She is a huge bird. We recently had some visitors come to the house. One of the young girls told me she wanted to hold that big chicken. I laughed and told her that that big chicken was really a turkey and that it weighed as much as she did. It honestly weighs about 40 pounds. She gives us very large speckled eggs. I can make an omelet for one of my young children out of one turkey egg.

Collecting eggs is a chore that my younger children really enjoy. They like to find the eggs and count them. They have to stay on top of the job though. One day last week passed by without anyone collecting eggs and the next day my boys collected 56! Yes, almost five dozen eggs.

It is not just our domesticated fowls that are laying a bunch of eggs right now. We have killdeers that live in the pasture beside my home. They nest on the ground, which is not the safest place to lay eggs with the fire ants, coyotes, dogs, etc. that live around here. One of the females built a nest on the side of a road. It used to get muddy there really bad so we put a load or two of grey rock. Finding her nest I understand why she chose the spot. Her eggs are gray with black spots. They are very similar to the rocks on the road.

Birds are laying eggs in their nests all around. Eggs hold the hope of new life and pretty soon we will be seeing baby birds of all varieties by the lakes, in the trees, in the barn, etc. It really is an egg-sighting time on the ranch.

From all of us, we wish you a very Happy Easter!

Either it was a big coincidence or GMO is a hot topic issue because after I posted last week’s article about GMO grass, Drover’s Cattle Network has led two weeks in a row with stories about genetically modified organisms in its publication.

The first article was a commentary, “Did Whole Foods Market Go Too Far on GMO Labeling?,” by Greg Henderson. Whole Foods is the “first national grocery chain to set a timeline for GMO-transparency.” It has announced a five-year plan to label all GMO products.

Mr. Henderson begins stating that Whole Foods has earned its nick-name of “Whole Paycheck.” He goes on to say that all this labeling will do is cause prices to go up. He quotes, “Louis Finkel, executive director of government affairs for the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, said, ‘These labels could mislead consumers into believing that these food products are somehow different or present a special risk or a potential risk.’”

The most recent article is, “US Retailers Vow Not to Sell GMO Salmon,” again written by Greg Henderson. The FDA is poised in April to allow the first genetically engineered animal to be sold in the United States food supply, which is salmon. In response about 2,000 grocery stores, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, have been proactive and announced that they will not carry or sell the product.

Mr. Henderson quotes, Emily Anthes saying, ‘“We should all be rooting for the agency to do the right thing and approve the AquaAdvantage salmon, It’s a healthy and relatively cheap food source that, as global demand for fish increases, can take some pressure off our wild fish stocks. But most important, a rejection will have a chilling effect on biotechnological innovation in this country.”

Really? She is worried about the future of biotechnological innovation. Most of us are more worried about the health effects of eating genetically modified or genetically engineered foods.

I believe that transparency is the real issue. It seems that food companies don’t want GMO labeling for fear that consumers will not purchase their products if they knew the truth. If the products are really as good for you as the all-natural products, then they should want to announce it proudly. “This product has genetically modified organisms in it. Science has made this food cheaper for you, but just as healthy.”

Fighting the labeling process makes me wonder. Hopefully, one day American consumers will be able to purchase GMO or non-GMO products with proper labeling. Regardless of how you feel about GMO products, I think we can all agree that allowing us the right to make an informed decision will be a good thing.