Winter is indeed our slowest time of year on the ranch. It wasn’t always that way at Alderspring. In fact, nearly all of our neighbors up and down the valley are in the throes of calving right now.  It means creating a full time ER and OB ward on every ranch.  Thousands of calves will be born this month in our valley alone.  We did the same thing years ago—synchronized our herd for breeding and nine months in the womb so that we calved in January and February.
Brutal is the word I use for it. There were many days where I never slept, as babies were being born every hour or so, and frequent blizzard winds would come out of the north to freeze dead to the ground the wet calves before they even had a chance to get up and take their first steps. I remember many nights where I was bleary-eyed in our tiny cow barn with 15-20 thirteen hundred pound mothers bathed in rime from the ice fog that their breath made at 35 below zero, checking them, one by one to see if they were in labor.
If they were, I often intervened and pulled a calf out, knowing that controlling the birth (to the degree I could) would often increase the calf’s chances for survival as opposed to mom on her own out in the brutal cold.
That brutal word is the one I used not only to describe my condition; the greater reference is to what the cow had to endure. These are near wild animals, you see. They aren’t milk cows, bred through generations of confinement for docility to produce one thing: milk. Instead, these beef cows have most of their wild inclinations intact, and putting them in a highly managed environment is stressful for them and occasionally dangerous for the human interventionist.
About 15 years ago, we realized that cows had all it took to have babies on their own. They didn’t need us to intervene. In fact, my theory was that many of the problems like breech calves and cows quitting labor were a result of stress. I even believed that the dreaded scours, or calf diarrhea, that plagued us every year, killing several calves, would end. I remember some years where scours were exceptionally bad on neighbor’s ranches. One vivid memory I have from visiting one neighbor is a huge pile of some 50 dead calves waiting to be buried.  It was a cold sunny January day, and two boys played with their Christmas Tonka trucks in the nearby mud.
Things changed instantly when we moved our calving date. We haven’t had to intervene on a birth for many years now. The cows aren’t even within a mile of a barn. They calve on green grass, just as their ancient forbears did. We haven’t had a case of scours for several years either. The calves seem like they are born running, up within a few minutes after birth looking for breakfast. Mama just heads off to the brush one day and comes out with a calf.
It was a huge paradigm shift for us. We didn’t have to calve in January like our neighbors because we didn’t have to have them ready by October for a semi-truck to take our calf “crop” off their mothers to feedlots in the Midwest. Instead, calves live their lives out on Alderspring. There is no feedlot semi. There is no feedlot.  Just wild mountain pastures. A right place for wild cattle and the food that they serve us with.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t try to manage our beeves. On the contrary, we manage them for greater wildness, meaning that we strive to create an animal that fits in their natural environs, complete with the instinct package that it needs to survive”¦and thrive in our wild landscape.
I posted a video on Youtube about just that—we have had a few questions from folks asking about the pictures they’ve been seeing on Facebook of the cream or gray colored beeves we are raising with our black angus. See why here on our YouTube channel.
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