It’s calving season… and for as much as I like the excitement and potential in each new born calf, I could never get excited about checking on the cows in the middle of the night. (and to be fair, I’ve only had to do that a small percentage of the time compared to others in […]

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We received our first taste of winter over the weekend with a fast moving snow storm that left us with just under a foot of snow. As far as snow storms go, the timing on this one was about perfect. The snow really didn’t start accumulating until after everyone was home Friday evening and wrapped […]

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Last weekend was beautiful for November… sunny skies, highs in the mid to upper fifties. It would have been a perfect weekend to finish up the porch or dig carrots and potatoes. Instead, I spent the weekend with Sissy at a 2-day version of Stock Show University’s Grad Program. Stock Show University is an educational […]

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Sissy had her first experience helping video/photograph sale calves this fall at my parents. We use a calf off-screen for the actual calf we’re videoing to follow around. For us, it makes recording the calf a lot easier. Sissy got to lead around the “off-screen” calf all afternoon while we recorded the sale calves one […]

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Have I mentioned we’re in the egg business now? Well, not in the formal eggs-by-the-truck-full-from-a-barn-full-of-caged-chickens egg business, but rather the we-have-the-room-let’s-get-a-few-more-hens-and-sell-some-fresh-eggs egg business. What started out as five chickens as a project for the kiddos grew quickly with the addition of a new group of chicks this spring. The timing couldn’t have been better, the […]

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400 eggs… somebody asked me the other day how many eggs I thought we’d gotten from our five hens since they started laying around the first of February so I sat down and penciled it out. In the beginning, we’d mark on the calendar how many eggs we’d get each day so we’d have a […]

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Humor me for a moment and imagine the Iowa State Fair grounds. Now, take away all of the activity that you’re probably visioning – vendors, displays, rides, people – except for what’s going on in the main cattle barn. Add some snow, extremely cold temperatures, trucks and livestock trailers parked everywhere, and the people that […]

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Two weeks ago the DW found the first of the pullet eggs. Over the next week, we’d find an egg every other morning… slightly larger than the day before. A pretty good guess – there was one hen doing all the work. Still, the kiddos were able to collect enough eggs for the Sunday morning […]

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It’s been twenty weeks since I was called to the post office to pick up a chirping shoe box. The excitement for the kiddos over the fuzzy day-old chicks is long gone at this point, but thankfully not their interest in raising the chickens (though it has waned a time or two – cold weather […]

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My family has raised registered Simmental cattle for breeding stock (or seed stock) for over 30 years. During my involvement with the business I’ve grown used to answering all sorts of questions from my non-ag friends and curious on-lookers at fairs. Anything from “how big will it get?” to “why does that one have a […]

Read more on "Purebred v Commercial: An Explanation"