Blown off course

Wednesday was one of THOSE days.
The wind started Tuesday night, gusting to 70 km/hour at times. Wednesday morning started out with having to put out hay for the sheep and goats, as they had finally grazed down the grass in their new paddock. I was quite impressed that they grazed it for a month but still wish I had more grass to avoid feeding hay.... anyways. The lambs were easy to move into the corral, roll out a bale in their pasture and put them back. We move them when we roll out hay because they will run up and swarm around the tractor - which makes it really hard to try put down a 1000lbs bale without squashing an animal, and then roll it out without driving over eager little critters that cannot wait for their breakfast. Then we moved the ewes and goats into the next pasture and rolled out 2 bales for them. The wind took the swathes of hay and blew it around, some of it ending up right against my fence, on top of the electric offset wire. That would need cleaning up later.
 Then I had to set up an alleyway to move the ewes and goats back to where we had rolled out their hay. Moving them was hard, uphill and with a 70 km/hour head wind.... The ewes went through the gate and to the hay, the goats on the other hand, ducked out under the temporary fence alleyway at the last possible minute and headed for the yard. Convincing them to come out of the bale stacks and trees... took me to phone a friend with a trained dog because my 2 dogs weren't impressing the goats one bit. So we put the goats in with the lambs as that pasture has access to shelter, and the goats are such babies when it comes to wind, rain, snow... anything but perfect sunny weather!

Finally having everything sorted, I stopped my truck to pick up a pail blowing away in the wind.... forgetting to park the nose of my truck into the wind. So my door just about got ripped off, and now I have to listen to an annoying wind whistle when I drive as the door frame got bent.... oh the joys of the windy prairie!

The afternoon things didn't go smooth either. We were preparing for a custom cattle take-out in the North pasture. I helped Larry set up portable fencing as alleyways much in the same way I do for my sheep and goats. Larry's pasture is cross-fenced with single strand electric wire. Once trained to electric fence, cattle consider it a serious barrier. We do not have gates, instead the wire is loose enough that we can slip a 'lifter' - a 8 ft tall plastic pipe - under the wire anywhere we want, and just let the cattle go under the wire. Which works great once they get trained to recognize the black pipe as a 'safe' place to come through the fence. As it happened though, this particular group of cows had not been through the lifter much this summer and we had trouble convincing them to go. Its amazing how a cow will stop right at the line of fence posts,  even though the wire is up high where they cannot see or touch it... yet they refuse to cross that line. Add a strong head wind that the cattle didn't really want to move into and well... it took us  5 hours to move under 3 fence lines - about one mile. By that time it was too dark to push them the rest of the way, so we left them for the night. Walking in a strong wind like that is very tiring!

Thursday morning the wind had gone down a notch to 45 km/h so we took the horses out at first light to get the cattle into the corrals for sorting and load out. That went pretty smooth but loading the trucks took up all of the morning. Thursday afternoon we had to move portable panels for corrals from the North pasture down to Larry's home farm, to set up for Friday morning take-out of custom cattle. It was a long day too. Friday morning we rode out on a lovely calm morning to round up some more cows for shipment. Larry had enough help once the truckers showed up that I left after lunch to go into Moose Jaw to go watch the reining Futurity and support my coach and team mates that were competing. It was a nice break and I hope to be showing there next year.