Growing Pains

 

I have this pain in my left foot. It hurts more standing next to our working chute where the ground is lumpy from cattle tracks impressed during the rain then crusting over in the sun.   I look back at my husband clunking around an Aircast on his left foot.  It is caked with mud and manure and has remnants of duct tape from when he tried to protect it from the muck.  He fractured his ankle back in February and just now got it fixed which makes my fat, flat, foot fasciitis seem insignificant.  Nonetheless, we have spent the last couple of weekends tromping our sore feet up and down our corrals, spending more time in them this year alone than we have the past four years put together.  

Why so much time?  Do we just love looking at the lines of the fences or the exercise of climbing the panels or the trailing of cattle 200 feet into and out of pens?  Well, yes.  However, our increase in time spent in the corrals and the pain in our feet are just growing pains.

Growing our herd and our operation is something we’ve been looking forward to doing since we began.   

• Though it wasn’t part of the plan, we invested in pairs late last summer.  
• When it came time to sell the calf crop, this is the first year we kept a significant amount of our weanling heifers for replacements to add back into our herd.  That was a nice increase in size as everything came home in the fall.
• As if that weren’t enough, we took some of our calf crop income to buy 20 replacement heifers and 20 more investment heifers.  At one time this winter, we had doubled our herd size in one season.  

Calving began, and we had a handful of AI calves and good herd bull production showing up in February.   Feeding this herd in the winter was less burdensome due to a little cross-fencing and a decent feed trailer, but the extra time and energy spent was noticeable on our joints and our backs.  Instead of one or two calves to tag, we had three or four, and our eyes burned from looking longer for springing cows and heifers over three distinct calving periods. We went through gloves that seemed to grow holes, and the dirty laundry mountain grew larger each week. The growing seemed painful but was hard to quantify or justify in the thick of it.

The physical pains we feel are real.  Achy bones and muscles, sore feet, blistered hands, and tired, watery eyes are all part of growing pains, but the double entendre on the phrase exists for us as well.  Growing our herd and cattle operation were not the only adjustments in the past year.  This fall brought us a new baby.  Balancing family and farming is not an easy feat; though we didn’t expect it to be.  What we learned, however, is that it isn’t at all about avoiding those pains; it is about embracing them.  Transitioning and expanding is not just a means to an end.   Growing in itself is part of the process, and once it is done, our bodies will thank us, but that part of our lives on the land will be over forever taking the growing and the pains with it.