Van Dyke
Angus Ranch
Ranch News - August 1998
| August
1st |
| The warm weather continues out here, highs in the 90°s F (35-37°s
C). Things are really growing, our second cutting hay is almost waist high.
We are currently making silage out of our peas and barley, hopefully in the next day or
two we will finish up with that. We are almost done building our new sale pens,
it turned out super and there ought to be plenty of room to display all of the sale
cattle. I went up to the mountains yesterday. The cattle up there are doing great, there
is alot of grass left for the cattle and I doubt very much if we will use even half of it.
It appears that all of the fencing that we did up there did not do much good. I beleive
the elk have it all down already, hopefully by next year I will have a good idea on how to
fence a place that is covered with wild animals.
We would like to thank Joe D. Burton and sons for their purchase of 3 embryos and Tommy
Gumm of Single Tree Angus for their purchase of 3 embryos. We would also like thank Bill
Freeman for his purchase of 7 embryos. |
| August
7th |
| Weather is beautiful out here, highs still are in the 90°s
F (35-37°s C). Second cutting of our alfalfa is well under way.
The grain is starting to ripen and it will not be to long before we start to harvest. The
crops look excellent, I wish the price of them were excellent also so that I guy could
pull a profit doing this sort of thing. Soft white wheat was $1.70 a bushel here
yesterday. The cattle are doing great, we got around 20 bull calves in the other day to
clip up for pictures, Fred Stivers will be back in about two weeks to photograph them for
us. The sale pens are nearing completion, we just have to hang the gates and make a runway
to the sale barn.
We have been having some super flushes here as of late. Typically for this time of year
the embryo production generally goes down to nothing but we are averaging nearly 15
embryos per flush |
| August
18th |
| Weather has cooled down here the last couple of days, almost
feels a little bit like fall with highs in the 70°s F (21-24° C)
and lows in the 40°s F (4-8° C). It sure makes work seem a whole
lot easier. We started to harvest the barley on our dry land yesterday. The yield is
around 50 bushel to the acre (7.1 hectoliter/hectare) and is
weighing around 50 lbs (22.7 Kg). We have around 250 acres (101
hectare) of dry land grain to cut. In a couple of days hopefully we will get
to the irrigated ground and the crops here look super. We had some hail damage on the
grain by our Manhattan place on Sunday, looks like around 50% damage.
Things are really moving along for our sale, Fred Stivers will be back on the 27th of
August to take pictures of the bull calves, and then we will wean the calves the next day.
Hopefully things will start to improve on cattle and grain prices here in the next
couple of months. Not a lot of money to be made with these prices right now. |
| August
24th |
| We are well underway with the harvesting of our crops. It
appears to be a super harvest, if the weather stays nice it will take around 2 weeks to
finish up. The dry land barley ran around 55 bushels to the acre (7.8
hectoliter/hectare) and the dry land wheat went about 75 bushels
(10.7 hectoliter/hectare). We are now doing some irrigated barley and it
looks like it will make over 100 bushel to the acre (14.3 hectoliter/hectare).
We have almost completed our sale pens, just doing some odds and end things. They
turned out beautiful, we have 25 new pens to display cattle in.
Fred Stivers will be here again on Thursday to take pictures of the bull calves, we
have around 16 of them picked out to take pictures of. On Friday we will wean all of the
bull calves so we have a busy week this week. |
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