May 1998 Ranch News

Van Dyke Angus Ranch
Ranch News - May 1998

May 2nd

The weather has certainly changed out here, it is now borderline dry, with highs in the 70's and 80's F ( 21º -27º C). It is amazing the change from two weeks ago.

Dad (Clarence) is in New Zealand right now, he called the other night, it was midnight here. He figured it was 12 noon and was rather suprised to find out what time it really was. New Zealand is 18 hours ahead of us. He said it was beautiful down there and is having a great time talking with fellow Angus breeders.

Breeding season is winding down here. In another week or so I will turn in the pasture bulls. We flushed VDAR Elluna 97 this past week to VDAR New Trend 36 and got 10 number one embryos.

We would like to thank Donald Morris of Alabama, Rally Farms of New York and also Oxbow Ranch, Ken Cook, again on their purchases of embryos.

May 13th

Hot and dry is still the word out here, I would give anything if I could have some of the moisture back from a couple of months ago.

My parents are coming back from Australia today, they should arrive here tomorrow evening. I think they had an awesome time. I am going to try and get some pictures of some of the different Angus herds down there.

The conception rate of the embryos that we put in this year has been fantastic. We are currently running around 85% pregnant. We flushed VDAR Elluna 4161 last week and she produced 55 embryos of which 37 were number 1's, I do not believe that I will see that again very quick.

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we are going to get the cows out to summer pasture, that will ease up the work load a whole bunch. I will get all of the donor pages back to normal again in the coming weeks as well, I have kind of let them go for the last couple of months.

May 26th

Things are going quite well for us. We are starting to get some cows out to summer pasture so that is helping with some of the work that has to be done. Next week we will be turning the cows with heifer calves out in the mountain pasture.

It is just beautiful up there. We went up there last Saturday and seen more elk and deer than I had seen in the rest of my life combined. Temperatures have been in the high 70°s and low 80°s F ( 21º -27º C) the last couple of days. It is very dry here now as we have received only about 1/4 inch ( .64 cm) of rain in the last 6 weeks. If we could get an inch or two of moisture things would really start to grow.

Test pumping on the well should resume tomorrow. We had to get another well driller in to finish the job as the last one skipped the country on us so to speak. Hopefully we will get this whole deal rapped up in the next week or two.