Jedidiah’s weekly work summary

We had another real Western week at the Ladder Ranch! We started off by branding another bunch of calves out on the desert. It was a swell time! We had a really good team of ropers and wrestlers, which helped get the work done quickly. After we had the branding out of the way, the cattle were paired and taken to greener pastures up river. Unfortunately, some of the cows and calves haven’t found each other and have been searching for each other. Hauling cattle a few at a time has kept us busy this week. While all the cattle catastrophes were taking place, another intern and I worked on fixing some of the pasture fences for two days. One of the fences was on a lease pasture and had fallen into very poor condition over the past several years.  Furthermore, a lot of it was on steep, rocky slopes. With a little elbow grease and determination, we got it done! The Ladder Ranch has a newly installed pivot field that they had plowed and disc-ed this spring. We have been working on getting it leveled so we can plant it with Triticale. The biggest roadblock we had was repairing the old blade so that it would work properly. We had another big branding in the mountain pasture this week. We did about 270 calves in about 4 hours. By the time we got done, everyone was ready to go home! This week I also got to go out to help pick out 4-H lambs from one of the bands of sheep. We also moved a sheep camp, so I got to see how that was done as well. To finish off the week we hauled some sheep panels in preparation for docking lambs and a solar panel for a remote stockwater well. Besides all this, we started working with some 3-year-old horses and trying to gentle them down. It is definitely a learning curve for me but I am excited about it!