Family Farm Friday #60: This Is Gonna Suck

"Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

You guys read a lot about how great it is to live on a farm. You know....calves being born, deciding which bulls to use, sorting ewes for breeding season, neighbors helping neighbors, learning important lessons.....

Well, a couple of weekends ago we had to do something that wasn't much fun. And because I think it's important for people to understand the good and the bad, I wanted to do a blog about it.

My dad and I loaded up in the truck and headed out to look at all of our cows. We couldn't come back to the house until we had a list of 10 cows to sell because we don't have enough grass. It hasn't rained. Our pastures look like this:
Last year at this time, they looked like this:

Because it hasn't rained, we've been having to feed cows hay all through the summer. Usually, you only feed in the winter. This means that we've had to buy twice as much hay....some to feed now, and then some to get us through the winter. Add to that the fact that we have not been able to raise any hay of our own due to the drought, and things get pretty bad pretty quickly.

So there we stood, in the pasture, looking at our cows. Mind you, every cow that is on this place had a calf last year. And the calves look good. Really good. Every cow did her job, and yet we are stuck having to get rid of some. We figured and thought and tried to find ones that looked pretty thin or old or otherwise unhealthy.

This little exercise just about made me sick to my stomach. My dad and I returned to to house both in pretty foul moods. We didn't want to have to make that list. But we didn't have another choice.

This ties right into the blog I wrote last week. If we were "desensitized" and unfeeling and uncaring, do you really think that it would be this hard to go sell a few cows? Do you think that we'd care? According to the critics, we should actually be excited because we'd get money for selling them.

Let me assure you, that's not anywhere near the truth. There was nothing fun about it at all. My dad summed it up best when we got into the truck to head to the first pasture. "This is gonna suck." And it did.