Farmers from the city!!!

Not too long ago, someone mentioned that we needed to post some more of our "farming stories", so here goes... Since Todd isn't up to taking care of the animals right now, we decided that we should get rid of the bull (Oliver) and the steer (Rib-eye) who thinks he should be a bull and acts totally like one.  There is an auction barn in Shelbyville, so no problem, right?  The kids and I will just get them into the corral, load them into the trailer and truck them into the auction barn.  Easy as pie! Except... It was kind of an awkward situation.  Oliver didn't really belong to us - we had him at our place for several months, and his owners weren't really interested in having him back, but we couldn't get a hold of them to see if we could take him to them or what we should do with him.  Finally, after several phone calls, we got permission from them to take him to the auction barn - whew.

The first part went great.  They cattle love grain, but they usually only get it like candy when we want to bribe them to move.  They'll pretty much follow a bucket of corn anywhere.  So we shook some grain in a bucket, poured it in a pile in the corral, and here they all came!  Now to get everything but Oliver and Rib-eye out of there.  A little trickier, but we did it.  Ahhh... this is going to be a breeze.  Every once in a while during the day, we went out and filled up their water and made sure they still had grass.  We were going to wait until after supper to load them.  About 4:00 the kids went out to swim and I hear Garrett start crying and the kids start yelling - Rib-eye is out!!! Somehow he pushed through a 5 wire electric fence.  Luckily he went into another area that we had fenced off.  It hadn't been used for pasture for a long time, and we had borrowed several fence posts from it, so the wire was pretty loose, but it was at least better than him being in the yard or in the neighbor's field.  We knew it wouldn't keep him in very long, but we quickly made a makeshift gate and closed him in so we could work on getting Oliver in the trailer.  Todd did come out and help us out part of the time.  The girls and I tried to do most of the moving and work, but we were really glad for his supervision!

We were able to get Oliver into the trailer after a while - he was kind of grumpy - he wanted to stay with his girls, not get in a trailer by himself!  Now, what were we going to do about Rib-eye?!?  He was wandering around the little pasture - the same pasture where we have the moveable pens for our meat birds.  The same pasture that we had to go in to move and feed and water the chickens!  Sure enough, pretty soon, he finds his way over to the pens.  Right by the pens is the single wire - low enough for Heidi to cartwheel over (as she demonstrated to me this evening) - so certainly low enough for Rib-eye to step over... So here is the part where we are really glad not to have close neighbors - Laura, Abigail and I armed ourselves with a broom, a pool brush and a pool net and slowly walked ol' Rib-eye back through the waist high grass to the gate and back into the corral.  So now, Rib-eye is back in the corral and we don't want to take any chances of  Oliver getting out of the trailer while we get Rib-Eye in.  Fortunately, the auction barn is only about 5 miles away, so we drove Oliver over, delivered him and headed back to see what we could do about Rib-eye.  After a lot of coaxing, moving cattle panels and bribing, Rib-Eye climbed in and was delivered!  Whew!!!

Now what to do about those few sheep that keep getting out and into our neighbor's newly planted bean field...  The plan had been to work on getting them into the corral on Monday and take them to the auction barn.  These sheep get through any part of the fence as if it isn't there, so it is pretty hard to contain them in any of the pastures.  Tuesday morning, the kids got several of them bribed into the corral - they are pretty skittish and really hard to catch (the sheep, not the kids).  I grabbed one of them and we got her wrestled into the trailer, turned around and... the corral was empty!  The other sheep had found a spot they could get through and they scrammed!  Unfortunately, the sheep we had gotten in to the trailer was not the main culprit... but after working a while longer, we were able to get a hold of Ruby and get her into the trailer too.   We weren't able to catch their lambs, though, so now I am sitting here, feeling really bad as I am  listening to them frantically calling for their mamas. Oh, and did I mention that it was about 100 degrees out there both days?  We were one sweaty, tired family when we got this done!

After that long story, I'll add that for some reason Todd is feeling really tired and pretty sore today!  I'm sure he probably shouldn't been out helping wrangle animals!  He really didn't do a lot of work with them, but after a few weeks of basically sitting in a chair or laying in bed, just being up and around and in the van and out of it was pretty hard on him.  I can hook on the trailer and drive it just fine, but when it comes to backing it up in a straight line at the auction barn, I'm kind of hopeless, so he came along to do that part for me. Hopefully it is a short set-back!  He seems to take about 2 steps forward and one step back with the way he feels.  As long as he keeps Motrin in his system, he can at least function.

Tomorrow evening we load our meat birds to take them to be processed.  Something tells me that it's going to be a whole lot easier to get them in the crates and on the trailer... There is something a whole lot less intimidating about waddling, squawking chickens than there is about a bull that paws at the ground, growls and trumpets and  stares you down every time you make a move!   Most likely we'll have some kind of a story to tell about it, though.