I set out around 7:00 AM this morning for APD Farm here in Fauquier County (same farming practices as us – 100% grass fed, no antibiotics, hormones, etc.) to pick up eight Devon steers. The steers had already been sorted out of the herd and were in a small corral ready to be loaded onto the trailer. Buying and selling cattle is always done by the pound, so we needed to get a total weight on the group. To be more specific, we needed two different weights, because even the price-per-pound of the cattle depends upon the weight of the cattle and we had two different weight ranges to work with.
One way to do this is to run the cattle into a squeeze chute that has a scale underneath it. This is a fair amount of work and puts a stresses the cattle (and us!). But the guys at APD had a better idea, which was to use the drive-on scale at the local quarry. We took three trips there: first, to weigh the empty truck/trailer, then to weigh the six younger Devons, and finally to weigh the whole group. Low stress for everyone! Then it was back to Living Pastures to unload.
The first paddock was at the bottom of a smaller field that slops down at a somewhat significant grade, certainly steeper than it seemed wise to take the truck and trailer down. So we backed the trailer up to the top of the hill and used our electric wire to run a little alley way down the hill. The Devon strolled right off and followed the path right into the paddock where they immediately began happily grazing! These cattle were born into a rotational grazing system so they are very well adapted to minding the electric wire.
I am very grateful for how smoothly everything went today! It’s pretty rare in farming to have a plan go just how you drew it up, so many thanks to the folks at APD, first for their beautiful cattle, but also for their great logistics this morning!
Here’s hoping everything goes well tomorrow; we will be picking up 15 Angus cattle from another farm and bringing them back in two trailers. They haven’t been trained to electric wire, so I’m hoping the Devon will be able to show the them the ropes!