03/17/08
A Day in the Life of a Cow, Part 8
by Jason Williams

Author’s note:  This blog is about a real cow – “Old Number 5” – on my family’s ranch northwest of Kaycee, Wyoming.  While the cow’s “thoughts”and feelings are obviously conjecture, the day-to-day activities and movements of this cow are real.  We will follow her throughout the year to all of the pastures she grazes, and she will give her “opinions” about all of them and the happenings within her herd.  My family and I  expend a lot of time, energy, and resources to make sure the cattle have plenty to eat, fresh, clean water to drink, and are, for lack of a better phrase, Happy Cows.  Please keep in mind that my intentions for this blog are not to “humanize” cows – or any other animal – but merely to provide a look into what a typical cow here at Brock Livestock Company goes through in a given year, and her possible “opinions” about things.

Like January, February continued to be a cold month here at Brock Livestock Company in Wyoming.  If you read last month’s entry, you will remember that in January our ranchers moved all of us to some fresh meadows further down the North Fork of the Powder River.  Since there was a lot of forage left over from last summer’s irrigation, we have been able to stay on these meadows all month long.  These meadows are more in what we cows call the "flatlands", so there aren’t as many ravines for us to hunker down in when that famous Wyoming wind gets to blowing.  However, this area offers us a form of protection that is just as good – Greasewood.  For those of you not familiar, greasewood is a woody plant, which deer and antelope like to browse on, and it can grow higher than my head! The patches of greasewood down here make great windbreaks for my calf and herdmates to find shelter in. 

For those of you that have been reading this blog for a while now, these are the same meadows we were grazing in when North Fork flooded back in July.  This is the first time we have been back since then, and it is interesting to see how the flood changed things – namely the river channel.  Because the flow of the stream changed in places, it also offered us new – and in many cases, improved – winter watering holes along the creek.  Since the ice on the creek will typically get up to 2 feet thick in the winter time, good watering holes – places where the water flows fast, close to the bank, and is not too deep, are quite valuable to us in the winter time, and there are quite a few of those in these meadows now.  The flood also left a lot of debris in the meadows of course, but these will all turn to mulch in time and become organic matter in the soil. 

I hope that the month of February was as good for everyone else as it was for us here in Kaycee.  I will write again soon!

-Jason Williams, Brock Livestock (Jason is one of the valued partner ranchers raising cattle for Tallgrass)