Cattle First Documentary

I am so incredibly proud of ranching. I'm proud of my great-great-grandfather for, you know, starting us on this path and instilling whatever it is that allows my family to make this work, you know, in changing times. And it's a very simple thing. You know, we are turning grass into protein. To do that well is a very worthy job. It's a good thing. Come on girls. How we make our livelihood, provide for our families on the Flying Diamond is having healthy cattle that reproduce, have healthy babies that grow and perform well. And to accomplish that, we got to make sure we're doing things right. We got to make sure we're grazing right. We got to make sure our animal health and animal performance is right. Animals existed and thrived before human interaction and we have found that if you take care of your animals in a way that nature took care of them, you kind of remove yourself, let the cattle behave naturally, see how that benefits them, how that benefits the environment that they graze upon. And, you know, it all just kind of works together. It's pretty humbling to see that happen. Flying Diamond Ranch is a family-owned and operated cow-calf and yearling operation that's been headquartered in eastern Colorado since 1907 when my great-great-grandfather Charlie Collins founded the ranch. The ranch scattered out over 50,000 plus acres, thousands ahead of cattle. My wife Jean and I own the Flying Diamond, but now we've incorporated in our four kids into ownership and management of the ranch. We have property in Westcliffe, Colorado in the mountains. Then the old family ranch is in Kit Carson. Then we have some property halfway between Westcliffe and Kit Carson. It's 4,000 acres and we're kind of evolving, you know, finding where everyone fits well. Jennifer's kind of in charge of our grazing. Charlie's managing the ranch in Kit Carson. Miles, he does kind of the administration and admin for it. My wife Jean and I kind of manage a few of these front range things. Our oldest son, Wills, the CEO, kind of keeps the whole thing together. And mom, you know, she's kind of a guiding light for the family. I think that's been one of our unfair competitive advantages in our family for the 115 years is we've always really valued the women. They're all out here roping. They're all out here giving shots. I mean, they're doing all we're doing out here every day. We're just a better unit by using the girls and the guys equally out here. I can remember a lot of bumping around in the truck with my dad while he was throwing hay off the back. I mean, I can't ever remember not wanting to go out and, you know, check cows, feed cows, do whatever. Big dog. And I don't know if there's a lot of other industries or careers where literally your entire family is a vital element of a job. You have to get done. Do you know why they're coming to see us? Because they're curious. Do you think they want food or do they just want to know who we are? I love being able to bring my daughter out into nature in a way that is, you know, very different than going on a hike. It's we're working in nature. It kind of matters on a pretty, you know, deep, big level. It's working with animals. And, you know, this is different than our dogs. This is understanding how animals interact with nature and what our part is in that. Giving that knowledge and imparting that on my daughter from a very young age. I just love that. And I hope, you know, she grows to love that. I have amazing days out on the ranch, amazing memories that I'm so happy and grateful to have. And now I have the opportunity to contribute so the next generations may have some of those good days. My wife, who grew up in the city, is very excited to have our children grow up in this lifestyle. For now, going into the sixth generation and for a family business to last that long, especially in the cattle industry, is amazing. You have the perspective of the generations that have come before you that have really poured their blood, sweat and tears into making this place that we're currently benefiting from. And then now I have my son. You know, we're working to make this place the best that it can possibly be so that he and his cousins have an opportunity to come back to the ranch and make it better than we have in this generation. Grandpa Collins, he had left home at 13 and went to Mexico and was hired on some of those cattle drives that were bringing cattle from down there up to Kansas, Montana, for watering for those large herds. Okay. This ranch was foreclosed at the time and that would have been probably 1900 maybe. And they sent him out to manage it. So he came out and branched it and then he decided, well, he really would like to buy it. My dad always said he didn't get it paid off until 1944, just before he died. Wow. So it took him a long time. I didn't realize that. So Rod got through the Great Depression. Yeah, he went through some tough times, I'll say. Low cattle prices. Dry. Yeah, dry. In the 30s, the Dust Bowl. Right. That was really bad. And then always worried about enough rain to make enough grass for summer and winter. People still worried about rain. But it's still the basic cow-calf operation, you know, and the ranchers just stayed with it. Yeah. You know, if you just stay with them, they're pretty loyal. The ranch is just a continuous thing. It just goes on and it's part of your life. It's very special. The beauty of nature. I just feel it was the right place to grow up. When you see all your great-grandchildren running around, is it, you know, something you just can't really believe? That's right. No, I'm so grateful. That's just exactly the dream come true. Four generations before me did their job and their role of providing this opportunity to me and my siblings. I know it's possible. If I work hard, if I do things right, I'm going to lay that opportunity out for my kids. Ranching, kind of at its most simple, is turning free resources, sunlight, and a little moisture into grass. And then grass into beef. That to me is the ultimate symbiosis of nature and animals and man. It all has to work together and we have to really work at understanding and caring for the land. The best way to do that is through really paying attention to your grazing. Our grazing philosophy is to mimic the environment these prairies and this grassland has developed over for millennials. Back in the day, the buffalo were in tight, tight clusters. You can imagine 500,000 head buffalo really tightly compact. When they hit new grass, it'd take an hour for the herd to pass through. So when they left, it was very heavily grazed. But then the key to that is they would migrate so they wouldn't be back to the same place for a year or six months or stuff. So there was intensive grazing, but then long recovery. That's how the prairies of North America evolved. So to mimic that, what we do is these temporary fences to really concentrate our herd into small areas. Get a lot of hoofs breaking up the soil cap, getting their manure and urine in a concentrated area, hitting it really hard. But then through temporary fencing and whatnot, we can keep them off that for a long time and get that necessary recovery period. This fence line really demonstrates where the cattle have been and where they haven't been. You can really see the herd impact that has happened. We have worked really hard to set up a pretty intensive rotational grazing system that is kind of like a Rubik's Cube to think about and put together correctly so that the cattle are moving through our prairie in a way that gives any one spot of grass rest, you know, 95% of the time. Here we move our herds daily, so we move them quite a bit. Hey girls, hey girls, let's go. New pasture, new pasture. Our prairie out in eastern Colorado at headquarters where we've been for a hundred plus years, that's all native prairie rangeland. What that means is that all of the moisture comes from rain. We don't have any irrigation to supplement rainfall. Here in Westcliff, we have a lot of irrigation because we have mountain water. Most ranchers, what they'll do is they'll take native range, plow it up, reseed it with a monoculture hay, harvest it and then feed that to their cows during the winter. We're taking the approach of removing machinery from the land here and replacing that with nature's best harvester, the cow. In the next couple of years, there won't be hopefully a monoculture of just hay. More plant species will be here because the cattle will be turning up the soil, urine, manure and then just natural seed pollen from native range around will turn that hay ground back into native range. The name of the game is making any piece of ground grow more grass, which means making it healthier. The cattle, you know, their nutritional needs are going to be met in our grazing program and their job is to produce a calf every single year. That is their most important and really only job. We want our cattle to work really well in our environment. That is how we turn free resources into a product that the world wants. We calve later than most ranchers. We don't really start until May so that the mother is in, you know, peak physical condition and has all the grass resources she needs to raise a healthy calf. We try to be pretty in sync with nature. I mean, the deer and antelope are being born now. This is when we think mother nature wants cattle to be born. There are a number of ranchers that are farming, like right now, they're busy planting their corn, their crops, so they don't have time to mess with their cattle now so they would want to do their calving in January or February. But for us, we're real comfortable doing it the way we're doing it with nature. We'll just head down here to the creek and start looking for some cows that are calving. As a cow-calf operation, our business is get animals pregnant and having healthy babies. I think if you have calves kind of in very stressful times of the year, you're inviting more health problems. We really eliminate most of those problems by calving in sync with nature, in our case, May. Oh yeah, yeah boy, they sure popped in the last few days. I think we probably have 60 calves out here. Yeah, 30%. They come, they come. There's a couple hundred cows out here and 99% of them will do it on their own, but the 1% will have a backward or breech calf and then we would help the mother deliver the calf. We could go look at that bad, red, bad bag. Yeah. You've got her number down. I do. Yeah, we can get rid of her. It's kind of ironic that most of the time you want more milk, but there's a good example of too much milk. Literally, that udder could be of the type that the calf can't nurse. So, I mean, it's a life and death situation. We've got to find another home for that calf, but I think this one's gonna work out all right. That little heifer calf's persistent. Yeah. It's the only way it's going to survive. These are all cows. They've all had calves before and that's why we're not particularly worried about them having calving difficulties. Now, they've all been bred to our bulls and we are very cognizant about having calving ease bulls, we call them. Bulls that have been proven and they don't grow big calves. So that when these are out in nature, they can have the calves fairly easily. These female calves that these cows are having, we will keep all of those and they'll have their first calf when they're two years old. There's no more important health period in a cattle's life than the month or two leading up to their birth. This is the first time they're having a calf. Their hips are smaller, cervix is smaller, so just we keep a better eye on them and assist them if a problem arises. We try to consult with our vets and try to do what they say. It was probably four nights ago in the middle of night. I was going to turn them out yesterday because they look good, but then I started noticing that it looks like there's an infection in there, doesn't it? Yeah. She looks pretty tough. Looks a lot better than she did five days ago. I'm involved with pretty much all aspects of animal care on a ranch, from preventative medicine, to herd planning, to emergency situations, to sick animal care. Her uterus hasn't contracted down normally, so it is a uterine infection. Probably penicillins will be our best shot then, and we'll need to keep her close in for the corrals because we're going to have to retreat her. Vaccinations are a key part of a preventative health protocol, but in any situation, just like in humans, even if you do the best you can to keep your kids healthy, we do the best we can to keep our cattle healthy, every once in a while you'll get one that's sick. And in those situations, we believe the most responsible thing to do is to treat them with scientifically proven antibiotics to help clear up their infections. And then this one definitely got like an eye problem. He's been patched the last two days, but he knocked off the patch. We can definitely try to treat that eye because it's probably painful. I think there's been a lot of misinformation about how antibiotics are being used in livestock, and the safeguards that we have in place in our industry to make sure that those antibiotics are not in the food products that we're selling to consumers. We don't mass treat all animals. We just treat the ones that are sick. And that just kind of helps with swelling, or what is that? This will help with any kind of infection from that irritation. And then patching it helps because the direct sun on the eye can increase the discomfort, so patching it and keeping it in the dark will hope it heal faster. And how long would you leave that on, or just let it come off? Probably about a week, but it'll just drop off on its own when it's ready. Oftentimes consumers feel that cattle are just a product for us, or the end product is just beef, but in reality it's a way of life, it's a culture. It's incredibly important to us the quality of life that our animals maintain. We want to provide them with the best care, so we make sure that once antibiotics are used, and those animals undergo a withdrawal period in which they cannot be consumed or slaughtered until all the antibiotic is out of their body. We're doing our darndest to create the healthiest animals we can, because that helps us. Healthy animals lead to pregnant animals, lead to healthy calves. It's incredible that a newborn calf can stand up, I don't know, five, ten minutes tops, and it's up and sucking, and you know, I think when your motivation, the only way for you to eat is to stand up, I think that's pretty good motivation. She'll take care of that calf for the next six months, he'll be right at her side getting all of his nutrition from her. In a month from now we will brand that calf along with all the other calves and give it its round of vaccines. Pretty simple life. All our calves, they're about a month old, they've been grazing and growing, and now we have to start their vaccine program. We're doing, you know, what best prepares us for avoiding any major health risks in our cattle. In the state of Colorado, it is legally required to brand your cattle, so we do have to brand, and since we're doing vaccinations at 30 days of age, we figure we might as well do that other stuff altogether. But the real reason for branding and why it happens this time of year is to get those vaccinations and to get that health booster in the cattle. We get down to the barn about 5 30, saddle our horses, and then we just ride out. We're doing five days of branding back-to-back and it could be pretty difficult out here. It could be a hundred degrees, literally the dirt could be blowing. We are on horseback gathering up the cattle from their 300 or 400 acre pasture into the set of corrals. Honestly, that's the most challenging part of the day. That's where things can go south, where the calves and the cows just aren't paired up very well and they're looking around for each other and that can get a little Western. 99% of the days, there's not really a legitimate excuse to get up early and ride, but branding, you have like a big job you have to get done. You have to gather the entire herd. It's not a pleasure ride. You're all right, get in there. Let's go, baby. Let's go. You're big enough. Hey, hey, hey. Boy, they are a lot of baby calves. So right now, we're just sorting the baby calves from their moms so we can brand the calves, vaccinate the calves without the cows being in the way. This is somewhat of an intense situation. When we're working cattle, you know, if we're sorting calves from cows, you have to really be careful about your cattle health at all stages. Speed's important here because, you know, the longer the calf is from its mother, you know, the more stressed out it's going to be. So we want that process to be as short as possible and try to be in and out of here. During branding, the guy's roping them, pulling them close to the fire where the brands are and the vaccines are. Two guys holding them on the ground. We're putting a brand on the calf. We're giving it two vaccinations, a fly tag, castrating the males. All that stuff I mentioned happens in about 60 seconds. Obviously, there's a lot going on right now and it looks very chaotic, but we are really trying to minimize the amount of time that that calf is on the ground just because, you know, this is a stressful event and we just want it all to happen as quick as possible. Okay, come here, sweetheart. You want to try again? When we were gathering, we saw this calf with its mom, which is a good sign, but we noticed the calf wasn't doing well in the branding corral. It seemed to be really weak. So we pulled it out to get it in the shade. Thankfully, Laura came, our vet, and we're getting him some electrolytes and then Laura gave him a vitamin B12 shot and some sulfur boluses. So hopefully, he'll be back on his feet with his mom. One of the good things about these work days where we're bringing them all in is that we do get to see more of a one-on-one look on what cows and their calves' health is because they're all here and we can treat it a lot easier than we can out in the pasture. Should we get him back with his mom? Eventually, if we can get her in here so that he can stay in the shade. You just needed a little water and shade. We're in the business of animal husbandry, so, you know, we want animals to be happy and healthy, but it's also our bottom line, so we need to make sure that they're okay so that our business can keep functioning and running. But, I mean, really, first and foremost, we care about the animals and it's always, we'll treat an animal because it's the right thing to do. We don't want anything to suffer. He looks so much better. Okay, I've got to load alpha. You're loading alpha, Jim. Okay, okay, I'll do it, I'll do it. Get this pyramid shot. It's for respiratory and another shot, an alpha brand of seven-way for a lot of things that calves might get the first year of life. It gives them immunity. We vaccinate our entire herd so that they remain healthy throughout the summer and into weaning when we sell the males. These vaccinations are so important for animal welfare. It makes a real significant difference in the herd health. Common cattle diseases can spread throughout the herd and all of a sudden you've got very sick baby calves who are just, you know, not gaining weight, not thriving, and it can just spread like wildfire through your herd. It means that you're having to doctor those calves and you might have to doctor them multiple times, which means, you know, from an animal welfare standpoint, more points of contact with that animal and probably its mother multiple times, which we don't want to have that. And it just means that overall your calf herd is going to do poorly. You're not going to wean as much calf weight as you would have otherwise. So, you know, it's a very real consequence of not preventing that problem. This sets them on a good path so that they can thrive all summer. Five days of branding can be very dangerous. You know, you have 1,200 pound horses, hot irons, needles and scalpels, all this stuff going on. But, you know, it's just fun to be around the family and doing this. We have five grandkids on the ground. Two were coming and they were hanging around the branding. You know, they're little now, but I mean, they're starting to like to sit on the horse and like to see what's going on. Boy, mom, you know, is in her walker and on oxygen and she still wants to get out when we're branding and see what's going on. I'd rather be out and working and helping brand, really, obviously. Now, we let those calves back out with cows and they'll find each other. Cattle find each other by scent and call, not by vision. All this mooing. They're calling each other. And within, I don't know, half a day, every cow will have found her calf again. Then they settle down and go back to grazing and the cows go back to nursing and it's all back to normal. Now we leave them alone for about three months. They will spend all summer at their mother's side enjoying the prairie lifestyle. Come early fall, we'll bring those calves in. They'll get their second round of vaccinations. The majority of the males are steers at that point. We'll sell them to a feeder operation. A small portion of the males will become bulls and they will go into our breeding program. And then all of our females will get exposed, meaning turned out on a bull or artificially inseminated, that following August to get into the cow herd and they're now a cow. In this day and age, we have iPads and we have internet and, you know, digital world and all that. And in agriculture, that's definitely there. But then there's literally days that I am doing a task that my great-great-granddad was doing in 1907 in the exact same way. Horses, ropes, people on the same property. It's the same day, fast forward 115 years and when you take a second to think about it, it's kind of pretty powerful. Truly as a rancher in ag production, our decisions are for the animal's well-being. I mean, when your livelihood depends on an animal and literally you're making your living, you're feeding your family through stewardship and caretaking of animals. Putting animals first, I think it's just, you know, a guiding principle of our ranches. In my assessment, there's a lot of misunderstandings of what production agriculture really is in the United States. And yet that's what the consumer is hearing. That's what is shaping their choices when they are at the supermarket and whatnot. I hear, I think we all hear about factory farming and corporate farming. We, the Johnson family, the Flying Diamond Ranch, we'd be considered a large cow-calf operation. This is what it looks like. Almost always, family operation, guys like me are raising beef in America. I think a really amazing thing about family ranching is that your heart is always going to be in the right place because you're doing this for family. That means you will do the right thing for the environment. You will do the right thing for the cows and you'll do the right thing for the business because it's for a family. And there's no greater purpose than doing something for your family.