Provider: Jason Williams
Profession: Rancher
Hometown: Kaycee, WY

Summer 2006 Journal Entry

Hello once again from the Cowboy State! I hope that everyone has had a great spring and is ready for summer to begin! We have had an extremely dry spring here on the ranch in Wyoming. Since March we have received less than 1.5 inches of moisture, so the ground has very little moisture in it. Consequently, it looks like we will have very little grass to get us through the summer, fall, and winter of next year. If you have read many of my previous journal entries, you know that we consider grass to be our crop here at Brock Livestock Company, and it looks like we won’t be able to produce as much of our product this year as we’d like.

Just like in any business, when things don’t go as well as planned or hoped for, management decisions need to be made. In the case of the drought, we decided that we needed to get as many cattle off of the ranch as possible so that we don’t put too much pressure on the grass. We have been blessed enough to find a couple of fellow ranchers willing to lease us their grass for the summer, and we also decided to sell all of our yearling (12 month old) steers. Usually we would prefer to wait until the end of summer when the steers weigh more before we sell them, but it is more important to us to maintain healthy land and grasses than to keep the steers. However, through contacts Radona and I have made through our grassfed beef business, we were able to find a company that was willing to buy half of our steers while still allowing us to retain ownership on the other half. We were then able to send all of the steers to a rancher in central Nebraska who will finish, or fatten, them on grass. The company (Tallgrass Beef Company) will then pay us for the other half of the steers when they get processed and sent to restaurants in the Chicago area. We have never sold, or marketed our steers like this before, so this is pretty exciting for us here on the ranch!

The other big project we had in the month of May this year was rebuilding an irrigation flume on the ranch. We divert water out of the North Fork of Powder River into a series of ditches, which we then flood irrigate our meadows with, using plastic dams and shovels. An irrigation flume is a structure designed to carry water across a draw, or ravine, so that meadows on the other side of the draw can be irrigated. This particular flume, which had been built in 1949, had suffered a couple of severe cracks in the structure, which had greatly limited the amount of water the flume could carry. However, instead of rebuilding the flume, we decided to carry the water across the draw through a 30-inch plastic culvert which we buried in the ground. This project forced my brother and I to remember the math we had learned back when we were in school! We had to have a culvert big enough to carry the maximum amount of water we would ever be allotted in that ditch, so we had to calculate the capacity of the various sizes of culvert. We also had to figure out the elevations, angles, and distance the culvert would need to be. To do this we used a transit, which is a tool used by surveyors to determine slope, as well as a lot of math! I am very happy to report that our math and science skills paid off, and the new culvert works wonderfully!

If it seems like a lot of our management decisions are based around water, you are absolutely correct. We live in an arid climate, so every drop of water – whether it is rainfall, irrigation water, or water for livestock and wildlife – is precious to us and we want to utilize it in the best way we can. Therefore a lot of our decisions, and a lot of the money we spend on making improvements, are centered around water and how we can make better use of the limited water we have.

Of course the highlight of May was getting to travel with our fellow Providers to West Covina, California, and visit the great folks at Edgewood Middle School! Radona and I both had a fantastic time! We were able to take Marilee with us, which was wonderful. Marilee made her first trip to Disneyland that weekend, but I must confess that I think her parents enjoyed it much more than she did! She did great on the trip, and being able to bring her along meant a lot to Radona and I.

As usual, it looks like June will be a very busy time for us here on the ranch as we finish up calving, move the cattle summer pastures, and irrigate, but we are looking forward to all of it! Have a great summer!

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