Two weeks of total stockmanship

For the past couple of weeks, as a matter of fact the whole fall has been seeing lots of different cattle in lots of different facilities. Canada, Mexico and last week in the Dakotas. 

There is a great book by Ike Blasingame titled “Dakota Cowboy” My Life in the Old Days.  If you a reader of western lifestyle I highly recommend it. It explains the life and people of the area in the Dakotas that used to have thousands of cattle shipped by train from the Texas country and grazed off the “Strip” a 6 mile wide by 80 mile long fenced area that opened up to vast areas of strong grass and good country.

The Flying 0 ranch owned by Wayne “Biz” Hepper is a big outfit with lots of cowboys of all different styles and levels of experience. Smally is from South Africa and heads up the crew, and each division of the ranch has a leader. The crew consists of flat brimmers to bull fighters and steer wrestlers and everything in between. There is a young guy from back east that had never ridden a horse before he came, and Scott who has been on lots of operations that is an excellent horseman and stockman.  They all work together to get lots of work done in much the same manner as 120 years ago as when the strip was in operation except now they have trailers and cell phones, but the days are still long and the weather is always a factor in the enjoyment and effectiveness of the day.

I’ll share some videos of the work, the country and the crew.  I’m sure glad I got to spend some time with them sharing ideas about everything stockmanship with a horseback style.

I will put some video of my time in Mexico up soon. Just getting them put together. 

After a long week and many hours in the saddle everyone was proud of the work they had done, just as it was done in early 1900 and all through the years, and I hope in another hundred years it’s still the same.

I thank Biz and the crew for letting me be a part of the works and hope we were all better stockman at the end of the week than when we started.

I got to go back to Mexico and work last week. It had been four years since I had been to these feedlots with Zoetis Mexico. I was very surprised that it was almost all different workers. They went from an abundance of employees to having trouble finding enough help. Canada and the United States is taking a lot of workers.

I really like the people, the culture and the cattle. Esteban, the manajo de ganado (cattle handling) teacher with Zoetis Mexico sent some videos to me and I’ll share them with you. We went to lots of different processing, shipping, dipping and hospital facilities as well as pulled several pens, and while were waiting for some horseback guys to come pull a pen I got to help settle, find and pull some new cattle in the pen across the alley.

The food and hospitality was excellent. I can’t wait to go back.

This is a good video of the type of Cattle, pens and people in the feedlots in this region of Mexico. The town is Tamuin in the state of San Luis Potosí, north of Mexico City. It is A real high rainfall area and this operation has around 140,000 head of cattle on feed and 40,000 or so on intensively manage grazing systems. The name of the company of this feedlot is “Praderas Huastecas”. They have a slaughter facility that harvest over 1000 a day and employ over 1200 people with all operations.

In the next video, we were watching and discussing pulling pens. They have one person lead or go in front of the cattle, and then use two to three to pull the pen. A real good guy that is a manager and I jokingly call my Mexican Father as we got along real good last time I was there, asked if I would pull the pen myself.

it was a good opportunity to show that you don’t need to go to the back of the cattle and push, but get movement out the gate and just keep sending movement to that movement. These heavily eared cattle really string nice and follow the movement so all I try to do is send the movement to the movement. If they can see me and the movement it works great. I’ll post more of the videos of facility work.