Back Valley Ranch

Now that I’ve introduced our bulls the next step is to introduce our girls that make being able to sell this delicious beef happen.  We do things a little different on the ranch regarding our girls. Most ranches keep a relatively young herd and cull between the ages 7-10 years old.  We go by the calves and how they look. Once a cow starts getting too old they don’t produce very much milk anymore which produces a smaller calf. Once a cow gets to this point is when we decide to cull.

Since our girls live a very natural life on lots of acreage it seems to take a long time for a cow to get to that stage. I’ve figured it out and approx. 20 of our cows are over the age of 15 years old.  Some of our top cows are Panda, Daisy, Charlene, Charlotte, Bessie and Big Bertha to name a few who are 18-20 years old.  We love seeing these old girls who still look great and are putting out top calves. Of course when they do get too old and we do have to cull them it makes the decision even harder. But it is still a business and unfortunately we don’t have the grass to retire all the old girls. But not to many cows get to live this kind of life for that long, so that makes us feel good.

Our girls can be a little on the ornery side when it comes to moving them. They want to move on their own time and when they feel like this. Because of this we sometimes get people driving by who said they had a very difficult time moving a cow off the road for them to get through. Well to our cows, when you’re on Back Valley, you’re on they’re road and they’ll move when they want. People just aren’t used to seeing cows not move when you approach them. My favourite is when some poor sucker is driving by during feeding time. Our cows surround the vehicle wondering where the food is since we don’t feed at our ranch by tractor but by truck instead.

Through this blog you’ll here more stories about each individual girl as it comes up. But before I finish I want to leave with a little tribute to our oldest girl, Panda. At 20 years old Panda is our oldest cow on the ranch. Jerrys dad Harold bought a Beltie cross approx. 30 years ago and she along with Daisy are the last descendants from that original cow. Panda has always had boys which means there’s been no girl to keep to carry on her line. Well we finally have one. We’ll be keeping Pandas girl for breeding so the line from the original Beltie can be carried on.