Double A Longhorns

Hay Anxiety

I'll be honest, I put the cart in front of the horse a bit this year. I bought 42 large round bales of hay and scheduled delivery, all before I knew where I could store them.

I'm new to being responsible for a bunch of hungry animals, and I couldn't forget how scarce hay was last winter. Few people had hay to sell; and if they did, it was quite expensive. Hay is produced in the summer months. That's when hay is generally available and when the prices are lower. In a perfect world, you know exactly how much hay you will need in the winter, and you buy it all during the summer.

But the world of a first-time Texas Longhorn breeder isn't perfect. To really know how much hay my Texas Longhorns will eat over the winter, I need to know them a bit more, and my land. So this summer, as I saw hay producers quickly selling out of their first and second cuts of hay, I became anxious.

Here we arrive at my first fence project. I anxiously bought a full semi-truck load of hay and didn't have anywhere I could store it without the cows getting into it. As you might guess, you can't just put bales of hay somewhere in the pasture and expect cows not to mess with them. The solution I preferred was to create a fenced-in area where I could store about 42 bales of hay and some equipment such as our Bush Hog mower.

Skid Steers are for Digging

Starting this fence project, I quickly learned something about my land. The soil in Jack County, TX can be so rocky in some places that it feels near impossible to dig a post-hole. It's gorgeous here because we have lots of ridges and elevation change, but it means we have lots of rocks.

I spent a couple of days trying to dig post-holes with both a manual tool, and with a single-man auger. At best, the progress was very slow and at worst, I couldn't get to the required depth of 3.5ft. After tiring of the slow progress and the August highs of near 110°F, I called my local Kubota dealer and asked about getting a post-hole digger for the skid-steer.

After using the skid steer to dig post-holes, I can confidently say that I will never dig another hole without it. In our area with rocky soil, and with the Texas heat, it is a must; plus it's fun to use!

Many Firsts

Though I've patched a barbed wire fence many times now, this was my first completely new farm fence project; from building h-braces to hanging farm gates and stretching new wire. Though I'm sure a fence professional could find things that were done wrong, or could have been improved, I think overall the project went well.

We have more fence projects to do, and my experience with this one will be helpful. If I could do it over again, the most noteworthy change would be using 8ft line posts everywhere. For our first completed section of the fence, I used 6.5ft line posts which were buried 2ft in the ground. I've heard that this is sufficient for line posts. On remaining sections of the fence, I used 8ft posts buried 3.5ft. These 8ft line posts were significantly more sturdy. Given that this section of fencing is to store hay from hungry cattle, the sturdier, the better.

Amateur Hour

Life is funny. Some tasks are so plainly simple, yet can carry so much meaning.

For instance, take this image of me standing next to the first corner post I've ever set. What is a corner post? To most, it's just a wooden post in the ground. But really, it's the foundation of the entire fence. It's something you must do right. This strong post will hold up the fence for many years.

As a developer, I've written thousands of lines of code. Certainly those efforts were worthwhile, but to some extent, they are lost to time; certainly unseen. When I purchased this ranch, I immediately began using things that someone's grandpa built many years ago. That guy is gone, but there is a landmark that he was once here. This simple wooden post is kind of like that.