Categories
Animals Cows

1/2 a Cow

First off, if you didn’t know, our neighborhood is awesome. Everyone is very down to earth and nice. One of our neighbors, raises cows. Yes, it’s the same neighbor that herds his cows in front of our house. Our horses have gotten better about the cows now that they’ve seen them a number of times, but they still need some work.

Anyway, to get on with the story, we decided to purchase half of a small cow from this neighbor. We talked about it last winter, and last Thursday (day before Halloween), we get a call saying, “Your half a cow is ready to be butchered. How would you like it cut.” We didn’t have any sort of warning, but it was too late to do anything else, so we told them what we wanted, and today (Monday), Anna went and picked up 3 heavy boxes full of meat.

Here’s some pictures of the tiny fridge that Anna purchased filled with most of the meat (about 30lbs had to go into the kitchen freezer):

Freezer Closed
Freezer Open
Freezer full of cow

We got:
81.85lbs of Ground Beef
106.84lbs of steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.
Totaling 188.69lbs of Beef

The cost of the 1/2 cow including butchering came to about $723 (approx. $3.83/lb). Which not a scream of a deal, but the cow is grown on the pasture right next to my house, so it’s 58x better than what you would by in the store. =)

(Random side note: We just realized recently that both Anna and I (Ashton) have “O” Blood Type, which thrives on meat. Good thing, too.)

That’s all from the Farm today,
Ashton Anna

Categories
Cows Horses

Where are the horses?

Ah, they must be behind our neighbors house…

Oh yea, I guess.

*An hour passes*

Where the heck are my horses? I’m going to go find them.

*5 minutes later*

Ashton! My horses are gone!

WHAT!?!?!

That, my friends is a very entertaining start to what is sure to be an unproductive day. Anna grabs some halters and lead ropes, and we jump into the car on the quest of trying to find our four disappearing horses.

As noted in a previous post, all it takes is a couple of cows for Liana to break a fence… but this time she was on a good 10 acres of land, so we figured she would have enough space to run and hide (from the evil cow goblins).

Apparently not.

The Quest Begins:

LEVEL 1: Finding our steeds. We started our quest by driving off down the road for about a mile. With luck on our side, we found them without any problem:

LEVEL 2: Putting on two halters. (If we could lead two of the horses, the other two would follow, being herd animals.) The horses didn’t run off as we approached, and Anna got a halter on Liana and gave her to me.

During this time, a friendly neighbor by the name of Patty brings over a Folgers can full of “bribery” (grain). The other three horses were more difficult to acquire, but with the expert application of the afore mentioned “bribery,” Anna finally got a halter on Ossette.

With two of our four horses haltered, and our car sitting on the side of the road, we began on the journey back to the ranch.

LEVEL 3: Cows. Yes, that’s right. Cows… On this dirt road back to our house, we have a field of cows on the right-hand side. Thankfully most of them were napping a good distance from the fence, so it only freaked out the girls a little bit. (Jett, the stallion could care less.) With lots of love, coaxing, and hard pulling on the lead ropes, we managed passed Level 3 without too much of a problem.

LEVEL 4: More Cows! Yes… it gets worse. After another 100 yards or so we come upon an entire herd of awake cows on the right side of the road. The more afraid of the cows our horses got, the more interested the cows got. There must have been 100 cows pressed up against the fence. (I apologize for the lack of pictures as it took two hands minimum to keep Liana on target.)

We worked at getting past this level for a good 5 minutes. At one point, I lost the level (and the lead rope), and had to start all over again. =)

But in the end we did get through this difficult level.

And just as we did, I had a great photo opportunity with Liana and Onora:


(I think this is my favorite horse picture of all time.)

Little did I know, but these very attentive horses were looking at…

FINAL BOSS – LEVEL 5: Horse Stampede. On the left side of the road, is just over 40 acres of land and 30 mares, who are normally all eating grass. As I look over at them after taking the above pictures, I see at least 20 of them galloping straight at us….

I was praying that the girls wouldn’t spook as the herd drew closer, and my prayers were answered. The herd (thankfully) stopped at the wire fence, and the girls stayed calm. Jett even went over to say, “Hi!” As he sniffed noses with five other horses, one of the mares got her foot caught in the wire fencing, she panicked and ripped it away from the posts.

This freaked everyone out, and the stampede ran off into the distance.

After defeating the Horse Stampede, we had a short walk back to the ranch and completed the quest.


It turns out that the cows were making a ruckus this morning, and must of scared Liana into the fence… She broke down three fence posts and got a small cut on her chest:

The weird part is how she managed to get to the other side of the cows… She would have had to run past all those cows to get to where they were. That will be one mystery that probably will never be solved.

-Enjoy
-Ashton

(P.S. On a positive note, we met another very nice neighbor, Patty, and she gave us a ton of rubar leaves!
)

Categories
Animals Cows Horses

Cows and Horses don’t mix very well…

The road in front of our house is almost never used. Our neighbors find that it’s faster to drive away from us to get to town. That means we are farther from town than all of our neighbors no matter which way we go, but that’s fine cause we almost never have traffic on our road. Emphasis on “almost.”

About a mile North of our house is a cow farm who apparently uses our road to herd their cows. We’ve been here for a month and haven’t seen them before, but this is what happened:

We hear “Moo”ing outside, so we go to check it out, and are presented with this:

Here’s another close up of the cows:

Wow… That’s a lot of cows. Apparently the horses thought so too, because they were running around frantically trying to get as far away from the cows as possible. At this time, we had Liana (the grey) and Onora (the two-year-old bay) in the arena, and Jett (the black horse) and Ossette (the older bay) in the coral that you see in the picture above.

In this picture you see Jett and Ossette looking at the cows, and Liana and Onora are hiding just off to the right of the screen.

Just after I took this picture, Liana and Onora both jumped through different fence posts! They just couldn’t stand being that close to the cows, so BAM! They were out.

(Note the broken fence post in this picture. Thats the one that Onora jumped through.)

Lianna jumped through a fence post off to the right, which didn’t get her any closer to the others:

“How did you guys get on that side of the fence?”

Here is a close up of the fence that Liana jumped through:

And of course, after the big scare:

“Where did all those cows go?”

Now if I make a “Moo” all the horses look up at me.

Hahaha!
Good times on the Ranch,
Ashton Sanders