Spring Cattle Work Part 1 Home Ranch

It's the early part of June as I'm filming this, so it's kind of hard to call this spring roundup, but that's what I'm going to call it. Today we're going to gather up all the cattle here at the home ranch and run all the mothers and all the calves through the chute, give them their spring vaccinations. A few of them will need new ear tags. All the calves need ear tags. We're going to gather weights on everybody, and I can't remember what else. It seems like there's a few more things that we need to do to them while they're in there, and it'll come back to me once they're there. So let's get everything set up, get the cattle gathered up into the working corral here, and get started. That's what's going on today on Farmer Tyler Ranch. You know where to go. Get up. Come on. Come on. You dummy. Ollie, stay. Go. Wrong way. Well, that little calf jumped through that feeder panel, so we're going to have to get him back in the big corral and start over with him. Okay, we got him. So he's kind of hanging around. Well, he was hanging around the gate to go into the tub, and I think that's the best place to put him, or the easiest place to put him. So we're going to try it and see if he can figure this out. Hold on a second. Hey. Hey, crazy. Watch out. Watch out. All right. Well, we've got him with a minor little speed bump there, but the calf's back in with him now. So I think the plan here is I'm going to pull the cows out of this pen and then send them into the little corral. I've got the bulls locked up in the bullpen, so they will be able to touch noses through the elephant gate, but that's why we have an elephant gate there. They shouldn't be able to get through that. Okay, everybody needs to get out of here for now. Oh, look at all those girls, right? These corrals, you know, the good parts are good and the bad parts are bad. And after running cows through here, I think I might go get some oil pipe tomorrow and start on this because this is kind of the big job for the summer is to get all of this facility improved, get it rebuilt, get it safe for the cattle, safe for myself, and get things to where I can trust fences and, you know, wouldn't that be nice? I don't think I've ever had this corral to a point where I could like fully trust all of it. So I'm looking forward to that, but we've got the calves all separated from the cows, so we can start running them through the chutes. These guys need ID tags, an eight-way vaccination, and you might've noticed by now the flies are really bad, so I went ahead and got some fly spray. We're going to spray all them down with fly spray as well. So once we get that done, then we can do mama cows. Oh, and the male calves need to be castrated. So it's part of the reason why I want to gather weights on these calves so the steers, I can weigh them again in the fall and I can identify which steers had the better rate of gain because of the data that I'm collecting today, and then I'll be able to make a more informed decision about which steers to keep for harvest steers for the following year. So if memory serves, I think the way I've done this in the past that has worked the best is to just bring all the calves in here, lock them in the tub, they'll all fit in there, and then I can use my paddle to just start shooing them up the alleyway and catching them in the chute. This year I'm giving the steers orange tags and the heifers are getting white tags. I think this will just kind of help me when I'm looking at them out in the field to determine what's what, and then especially when it comes time to select replacements, it'll be easy to spot who's who, what's what, however you want to say it. You, white herring, don't be dumb. Thank you. All right, calves are all done. Let's get them kicked out into the big corral and start bringing the cows in. My hope is that the cows come back here pretty willingly because the last time they were in this pen, they had their calves with them and now they don't. So in their mind, the way to get back to baby is to come back through the way they came in, hopefully. Shoot, I almost forgot. I've got this, this little baby calf here. Still too young to give a vaccine to. She's less than two weeks old at this point, so I don't think I'm even going to bother putting an ear tag in her. She's always going to stand out because she's always going to be tiny. I'll know exactly who she is and I don't really see that I gain anything from tracking her weight gain. So I'm just going to get her pushed out with the rest of the calves. You're hiding in here, aren't you? I will put some fly spray on you though. Now on second thought, this calf is just trying to sleep back here. She's got a good little hiding spot. I think I'm just going to leave her alone. I think I can walk the other cows through here. They'll probably never even know that this calf is laying here. If it does get up and start wanting to move around, then I'll push it out then. But I think for now, I'm just going to leave her alone. Come on girls. Number 19 here, you can see you can barely read that tag. If I'm trying to identify her out in the field, this is going to be very difficult. I can read it up close, but we're going to give her a new tag. In the past, I would always use my pocket knife to cut tags out, but I actually got a tool that's especially for doing this and they work infinitely better, much safer. I should have got this a long time ago. If I do this right, I can put it in her old tag clip and it won't hurt you. But you got to hold still. I said it wouldn't hurt you. Where did my taggers go? Now you need a shot and you're done. So just for curiosity's sake, I wanted to weigh Buddy and he is 1324. He's grown a lot since he was walking around in our kitchen. Everybody in the back. Everybody in the back. Even you. Even you. Thank you for that. Easy. Well, number 20, always fun to deal with. Although, I think she's actually getting a little bit better in her older age. She used to be a lot worse. Well, all the cows are done now. Cows and calves. And I figured, you know what? I've got everything out here set up, ready to go. I may as well run the bulls through and do their pre-breeding. They just need to get a shot at eight way and I need to brand them. So may as well just do that now. And then when they are ready to go out with the cows, just a matter of opening up a gate. Ready to wear the brand, boy? Look at all this size. We're going to take care of it right now. Come on, boy. Well, I'm about beat. It was a good day. We got a lot done, a lot of animals through the shoot. And, you know, it always feels good when you get these big jobs behind you. But this is really only half of the story because we've still got the cows at the winter pasture that we got to do the exact same thing to. Not only that, we need to ship them all back home. So I'm probably going to do that in the next couple of days. I'm not really sure exactly when, but that's coming soon. And once we get that done, then I think all of the cattle are finally where they will be for at least several more months. So I'll be looking forward to that. But for today, I think we're going to call it here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, guys. And I hope I'll see you again on Farmer Tyler Ranch.