Provider: Ryan & Hope Pjesky
Profession: Farmers/Ranchers
Hometown: Goltry, Oklahoma

Spring 2007 Diary Entry

March 2007

With the coming of March, things really start to get busy for us.  March means baby lambs are being born.  When this happens, it takes a lot of time and patience to give them good care.  Newborn lambs are very sensitive to cold and wet weather until the immunity that they get from their mother’s milk can build up and the oily lanolin can build up in their wool.  When lambs are born, we put them and their mothers into a barn with private pens.  This allows them to bond with their mother and get her undivided attention.  After three days, we band the lambs’ tails, vaccinate them against several diseases, and turn them back out with the other ewes and lambs.  I have attached a picture of a new lamb.

Newborn lambs

March also is the time when we take cattle off of the wheat that we plan to harvest.  We group them by size and move the smaller ones to grass pasture and the larger ones to wheat that they will graze-off.  Instead of us harvesting it for grain, the cattle will harvest the wheat for us by eating it and gaining weight, or pounds of beef.  I have attached a picture of cattle on graze-off wheat.  Moving cattle involves corralling, sorting, and hauling them to a new place.  We can usually move about 100 to 150 cattle each day.  This process usually takes about a week.  Also, as with most months, we are buying new cattle, and in March we start to sell the biggest cattle on the farm.

I have been telling you about the extremely dry conditions we have been dealing with for the last year.  I can now let you know that I believe our drought is over.  Over the last ten days, we have had nearly 6 inches of rain.  My mood has improved considerably as everything is beginning to get green and grow.  Ponds that have been dry are now nearly full.  The most difficult thing about being a farmer is that our livelihood is directly tied to the weather.  We have no control over it, so we do the best we can with what we are given.
  

Cattle on graze-off wheat

April 2007

Our month started off well with a trip to St. Louis for our Provider Day.  We enjoyed our visit to the school and hopefully the students learned something about a farmer/rancher’s life.  We were impressed with how attentive the students were and the good questions that they asked.  While in St. Louis, we went to a Cardinals game.  We had great seats, but it was cold that night and the Cardinals lost badly to the Mets.  Before we left home we had been having unseasonably warm weather, but when we got back it was cold.  Overnight temperatures got down below freezing, and many people were worried about freeze damage to the wheat.  It now looks like the wheat in our area is OK, but some areas not too far from us have been hurt.

We are definitely out of the drought that we have been in for a couple years, at least temporarily.  If the old saying about April showers bringing May flowers is correct, we should have a lot of flowers soon.  We have gotten several good rains during April, and the ponds are full again.  The grass in our pastures is growing and looks good.  The wheat has headed out and things look great for harvest.  Some wheat in our area has a fungal disease called leaf rust which reduces yield, but our wheat seems to not be affected yet. 

April is a month where we do a lot of odd jobs that we don’t have time to do the rest of the year.  We have been fixing fence, which is very time consuming and labor intensive.  It involves digging postholes, setting posts, stretching wire and lots of walking.  We also have been servicing the machinery in preparation for summer use.  As always, we check the cattle and take care of the sheep each day. 

May 2007

May is really the month that starts getting busy at our farm.  Cattle work begins to mix with fieldwork.  During May, we sell the cattle that have been grazing off some of our wheat fields.  Most years we sell 120 to 180 head per week for two to three weeks.  This year we only sold cattle one week in May.  We bought less cattle because of the drought in the fall, and the moisture this spring has made our pastures really grow; therefore, we decided to keep some cattle that we would have sold and let them grow more.

In May, we spray for weeds in our pastures and along fencerows around our wheat fields.  We hire an airplane to spray really rough pastures, and we spray smoother, more level pastures with a tank mounted on the back of a tractor.  For fencerow spraying, we use a small 15-gallon tank mounted on the back of a four-wheeler.

In late May, we start tilling the land that we grazed off with cattle.  This begins the whole summer tillage process.  We also get all our tillage equipment, tractors, and combines ready for the summer’s work.  This involves mechanic work, which is not my favorite part of farming.  But the preventative maintenance we do now will help us stay in the field without breakdowns when we need to be working our ground.

As wheat harvest approaches, it is becoming obvious that we did sustain freeze damage to one of our two varieties of wheat, and that same variety has also been hurt by a fungal disease and armyworms.  It will not produce a good yield, and will be very hard to harvest since a lot of it is lying down on the ground.  It is a good thing that we purchased crop insurance which will help offset some of our losses.

Read Other Journal Entries