Winter Project

Welcome to 2020! I hope everybody’s New Year is going well. With the short days and most of the cows still out in the badlands, we are working on some projects that we couldn’t get to in the fall. I was hoping for some dry fall weather to get some of them done, but it was too wet. Now there is some pretty good weather for December and January. Dad has been using a lot of this time to build a new fence. My brother and I make trips up to help when we aren’t working on other things, but he has been the driving force.

This is in a pasture that just hasn’t had a border fence ever before. For years a steep hill has served as a “barrier” between this pasture and the neighbor’s pasture. The problem is there are plenty of trails down that steep hill. There have only be a couple of the neighbor’s cows have made the trek up the hill, but every year several of ours make the trip down it. This gives my dad a daily patrol in the springtime. He pushes them back toward the center of the pasture, but some still sneak away. We finally decided it was time for an actual barrier.

You may be thinking that the middle of winter is a bad time to build fence, but it hasn’t been terrible. There is a lot of snow covering that has kept most of the frost out of the ground where it is undisturbed. Where the snow has been driven on, it’s a different story. So every once in a while we have to bar through several inches of frost or drive a steel post through the frost. The stretch that needs to go in is over a mile long with several turns along the top of the ridge. We aren’t even halfway there, but we are making some progress. And, hey, we have a nice view while we are working.

How about you? Do you have a winter project or two?

by Brandon Greet