Preparing for Winter

Idaho rancher Kim Brackett keeps everyone up on what is happening on their ranch with her blog Beef Matters and this time of year is busy.
Brackett: "What we’re doing right now on the ranch is bringing our cattle home for the winter and one of the things when we do that is we assess their body conditions, see what kind of shape they’re in and then kind of adjust. See what their nutrient requirements are and adjust our supplement schedule accordingly."
Moving cattle from summer ground is not quite like the old days.
Brackett: "No. Honestly it’s mostly my husband and our kids. My husband drives up to the summer country and helps load the trucks and I stay down at our headquarters and receive the cattle as they come in. Then for the next few days we move the cattle around to the fields where we need them to be for the next month or so."
Brackett says in assessing the herd they get a good idea about how things went in the summer.
Brackett: "We’re just doing it visually as the cattle come off the trucks and we watch them as they’re in the corral and as we’re taking them out to the fields. We really want to see if they’re too thin. We need them to have enough fat - enough weight on them as we get into the cold winter months that they will be able to have enough energy to keep themselves warm. Honestly a few of the cattle have been thin. They just haven’t had enough grass this fall and so we’ve been managing our supplement protocol."