My life….ROCKS!

My final semester of undergraduate work at KSU has been somewhat “untraditional” but I am loving every minute of it! At the beginning of the semester, I was working on completing a research project on using different methods for analyzing bull semen quality. The second half of the semester, I will be at Heartland Cattle Co. working as an intern! In the meantime, I have been at home being Dad’s little helper. Basically I feed the cows, haul water, and work on other odds and ends around the ranch.  As a result, you will be seeing lots of pictures and hopefully videos (that’s my goal!) of cows over the next couple of weeks!

To give you a little taste of my day, here are some pics!

My morning started out by “caking” the cows. To our family, the term “caking” means feeding the cows. The cows are fed large pellets that are full of different grains, protein, and some molasses…the slang name for the feed is cake! The cows love it as much as I love cake (the real kind of cake with lots of frosting!)…they run across the field when they see the cake truck coming!

This picture is actually from two days ago. After I feed the cows I go over to the bulls to make sure the ice is broke on their water tank. We don’t have to haul cake to the bulls because they are grazing on a wheat field and have bales of hay that we bring for them to eat when it snows. The black hose in the bottom right hand side of the pictures is the hose that is used to put water in their tank from the water trailer.  Since there are no water wells at most of the locations we have our cows, we haul water to them using a 1,000 gallon trailer. I will try to get a better picture of hauling water sometime this week!

This afternoon, I hauled water to the bulls and cows. It’s important that we keep the tanks full so that the calves are able to reach the water to get a drink. Again, I will get more pictures of this soon!

Here are the cows eating sunflower flakes from the feed bunk! These are the cows that recently calved and they will be kept at the house for a few more days before transferring them over to the stalks with the other pairs (cows and calves). Sunflower chips are crushed sunflower seeds and the shells. They crush the seeds to extract the oil to use in making diesel.  The sunflower flakes are high in protein and fat. The cows also really like these! I guess you could say they are kind of like potato chips for cows…

That was my day! May not sound exciting to everyone but I love every minute of it!