I really enjoy sausage. My Grandfather made real good breakfast sausage.
We had a slaughterhouse house when I was younger and he jokingly called his sausage, 3 brand sausage. When asked what that meant he would say “tits, tails and touch holes”. I always got a kick out of how people reacted to that.

I’m on the plane home from a three week long trip. I have been to Colorado, New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, British Columbia, and the last week Alberta.

Yesterday, was a great finish to the run. We sorted and processed a bunch of bawling calves, did a little horsemanship demo, and then finished up with some of the best homemade sausage I have ever eaten.

Rick Hagel was the host. We had a nice mix of people in attendance, and Rick was great at letting the three high schoolers learn by doing and trusted them with processing the calves. They did a great job, had a great chance to learn because their parents were interested enough to get them involved, and everyone else shared knowledge with them. Great ingredients for making good young producers.

As I was eating my steak last night and thinking over my past three weeks, I got to thinking about all the sausage I have eaten. I try to eat pretty low carb, so when I stop and want a snack I usually buy some kind of sausage. In California I had linguisa sausage for breakfast every morning. At Cal Poly we just about foundered on the sausage they served at the barbecue. Gord Collier and I always eat lots of “pepperonis” as they are called in Canada. So as you can tell I like sausage.

Eating Spam In Hawaii

The thing that makes a good sausage is the ingredients. The right mix makes it the right taste and texture for different tastes and purposes. Not everyone likes the same sausages. It’s all about the ingredients.

At all the different places I went, they were all a little different. The folks at Fort Collins , Colorado were a little different than the folks in Cal Poly, California.

I went to a “rope and stroke” (team roping and golf) in British Columbia and the ingredients (people)were a little different than the ranch roping I went to a while back, but they both fit the tastes of the people involved.

Of the three operations I went to last week with Katie Roxburgh with Zoetis, the ingredients of the crews were very different, but all made good teams to produce beef.

So I came up with the idea of livestock production is not like a box of chocolates as it says in the movie “Forrest Gump”. It’s like a piece of sausage.

You can have a crew or family that make up ingredients that don’t fit together or blend very well and get by, or all the ingredients can be high quality and blend together to really create something that sticks together, compliments and blends well together to make a very good product. It’s even better if you are always trying to improve the quality of the ingredients that make it even better.

My job, in trying to improve stockmanship skills is all about improving the ingredients that are available. The better the inputs the better the outcomes.

We producers must understand that we need to make sausage that we can make at a profit, but also make sure the ingredients fit the customers tastes. If you don’t like or trust the sausage, you’ll eat less or find something to replace it.

So there it is, my worldly wisdom. Life can be like a box of chocolates if you choose, but if you control the ingredients it’s like a stick of sausage.

Put that on the fire and Cook and eat it.