I am posting a picture of what's left of 10 foot high sulphur weed in the North Rock Barn pasture after it was mob grazed. It was a banner year for ragweed and sulphur weed and the weeds in this pasture were literally over the top of my SUV prior to turn in. The pic will show you what's left after a day with the mob. Again, we are getting fantastic utilization out of the weeds (forbs) that are present in our pastures. The video is a tribute to Hal and all of his hard work designing and building our new set of working pens on the west side of the Goat Ranch. We used these new pens for the first time last week to work all of our cows and calves thru and they worked flawlessly. In fact, I can't think of one thing I would change. Congratulations to Hal for a job VERY well done! The key to the pens is the "Bud Box" on either side of the entrance to a double alley way. The "Bud Boxes" allow cattle to be brought in from either side and loaded into the alley way. The double alley allows as many as 8 cows to stand in line waiting to enter the chute. The cattle remained very calm and moved very well thru the set up with very minimal balking. Not only did we not have a hot shot while working, but you will notice in the video that the person loading the alley way doesn't even have a sorting stick. That's how well this set up works. We worked 565 head of cows with 4 (and sometimes 5) people in under 7 hours. It just worked fantastic. You can also see the cowboys in the background roping and dragging our calves. We find that this has the lowest amount of stress on the calves and is much easier to castrate the calves than working them thru the chute. The cowboys absolutely love this "work". We hire them for the day and quite honestly it's money well spent.
See the video here: new working corrals
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