Tag: ranching

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Head ’em Up

Tara Anderson shared these photos of her family’s cattle drive early this month. The drive takes place west of Wilmot each fall. The herd is driven from their summer pastures in the hills to their winter pasture in Whetstone Valley. “My grandfather, Glenn Ammann, began the tradition decades ago with his Hereford cattle,” Anderson says. “My father, Tyler Ammann, continues the annual event with his herd of 800 Black Angus cattle.” See more of Anderson’s work at www.facebook.com/sweetlifephotographybytara
Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Cattleman’s Blizzard

Editor’s Note: On Oct. 4-5, 2013, western South Dakota was pummeled by one of the worst blizzards in the state’s history. Winter Storm Atlas was unexpected and deadly. It began as rain, but then temperatures plummeted and winds began to howl. When the clouds cleared 2 to 4 feet of snow blanketed the Black Hills and surrounding prairie. Ranchers lost cattle, horses and sheep in the tens of thousands. We toured the storm-ravaged West River Country just weeks after the blizzard. Here are stories from the men and women we found struggling to recover.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Molly Reinhold looks for survivors in the snow, following the heart-wrenching blizzard that befell West River. Photo by Rachel Reinhold

LARRY REINHOLD watched the darkening clouds while hurrying to plant a field of wheat on Thursday, Oct. 3. He could almost taste the rain. Quickly jumping off the tractor to check the planter, he nearly landed on a big prairie rattler, but the snake didn’t seem to care. Maybe it sensed that bigger trouble was looming.

Larry Reinhold called his family together for a prayer as they began the task of recovering from the blizzard.

Reinhold and his family ranch 20 miles north of Rapid City. Before sunset that Thursday, they brought their cows and calves to a windbreak below a big dam near their house and barns. Many of their mares and colts were sheltered behind a barn in another windbreak. The Reinholds raise and sell quarterhorses, and they also saddle them every summer for 400 youngsters who attend Rainbow Bible Ranch, a camp started by Larry’s parents in 1979.

Further north in Meade County, Dallas Basel was hauling hay from the fields to the yard on that fateful Thursday. He and his wife, Tammy, watched weather reports on television when he came indoors for supper. Rain was forecast, so they locked the sheep in the corral. The Basels’ cattle were about two miles away, still on summer pasture. After years of drought, rains had fallen in 2013 and the grass was still green; cows and calves were getting fat.

On that Thursday afternoon, the Cammacks were moving cattle.”They’d predicted 4 to 6 inches of snow, which you can handle. Most folks had cows 20 or 30 miles away from their home place and that wouldn’t be unusual at all in early October,” said Gary Cammack.

Like most West River ranchers, the Cammacks have many irons in their proverbial fires. Gary and his wife, Amy, bought the Stoneville General Store in 1973. Sales were just $10,000 a year but they hoped it would supplement Gary’s construction jobs. He worked on the local missile sites, the Rapid City Civic Center and een the Alaska Pipeline.

Six years later, business had multiplied 10 times, so they moved from Stoneville — a veritable ghost town, even then — to Union Center, which was only slightly bigger but happened to be on Highway 34, a main West River corridor.

Through the years, the Cammacks added a restaurant, post office, branch bank and beauty shop. But the anchor of Union Center remains the original store, now known as Cammack Ranch Supply, a destination for men and women who spend their days with horses and livestock. The store doubles as a museum; hanging on the walls are harnesses from the Fort Meade cavalary, the headmount of a steer that starred in a Marlboro commercial and fossils unearthed in the neighborhood.

Two of the Cammacks’ sons, Reed and Chris, also run businesses in the town. Reed builds wood cabinets and Chris is a world-class taxidermist.

Union Center, population 50, has a community gymnasium with basketball courts shared by six rural schools, a new fire hall and a Baptist Church landscaped with massive boulders brought from the Black Hills, 30 miles to the west. By Friday morning, Oct. 4, the churchyard looked like a Christmas card as big, wet flakes of snow began to fall.

~

LARRY REINHOLD’S wife, Robin, is a weather observer for the National Weather Service. Her moniker is Hereford 12 SW. She noticed on Friday morning that her measurements were far exceeding the local forecasts. Snow was falling at the rate of an inch an hour. At 2 p.m. on Friday, the lights flickered out in her family’s old ranch house, which was built by Larry’s grandparents in 1929. Power lines across the region were already heavy with snow, and being whipped by winds gusting to 70 miles per hour.

Tammy Basel was worried about the sheep.”Being a nervous person, I kept walking around outside on Friday. At one point it was snowing, lightning and thundering. Dallas was worried that I’d get hit by lightning.” The Basels moved a tractor out of a barn, where it was sheltered, to make room for the ewes and their lambs.

The Cammacks made their way through snowdrifts to the store, but the electricity was dead and nobody was moving on Highway 34. Chris Cammack and a friend, Ben Meyer, decided to try to drive a four-wheel tractor six miles to nearby Enning so they could mount a snow bucket on it and be ready when the storm stopped.

Cautiously, they made their way along Highway 34, both watching for a sign of the road ditch in the white-out of the storm. They arrived and were able to get the bucket mounted. But visibility was next to zero when they started back. Fortunately, they’d tracked their route by GPS so they were able to follow the same path back to Union Center without seeing the road. Driving the tractor was like piloting a plane in dense clouds and fog.

~

DALLAS AND TAMMY BASEL awoke Saturday to a 6-foot bank of snow at their ranchhouse door. But they climbed over it and walked 100 yards to the sheep corral, where they discovered that the storm was a killer.

“We don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, pictured with her husband Dallas and their sheep herd after the storm. She meant that ranching is a life, not a job. Their ewes’ thick wool was washed snow white from the three-day storm.

Thirteen sheep were lying frozen in a snowbank in the corral.”It was still blizzarding hard,” Tammy remembers. Later that morning, she saw a lone cow come into the yard. If she was theirs, it had traveled 2 miles in the storm. That couldn’t be good, but the weather was too wild to begin a search.

Meanwhile, more than 100 cows showed up in little Union Center. The Cammacks had no idea where they’d come from or who they belonged to, but they herded them into a cattleyard and fed them hay. The highway remained empty of cars and trucks; the world was white and cold.

Larry and Robin Reinhold looked out their windows Saturday morning and saw a scene that looked as if a tornado had blown through. Trees were stripped of branches from the wind and heavy snow. Huge snowdrifts stretched between the house and barn.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, the wind and snow began to subside so the Reinholds made their way through the drifts; soon they had their first inkling of the devastation. Four horses lay dead in the shelter of the corral.

The two oldest Reinhold children — Rachel, 19, and Molly, 17 — began to search beyond the yard and saw an unusual sight — a line of mule deer mixed with antelope, walking single file, making their way through the deep snow.

The dam seemed like a surly ocean. It was filled to the brim from the precipitation, and waves were beating against the eastern bank. The family’s wily Hereford herd bulls had come into the yard. One stood on the porch of a little cabin.

A Hereford bull took shelter on the porch of a cabin in the Reinholds’ yard.

Darkness came before they or hundreds of other ranch families could assess the situation. They went to bed hoping that the cows and horses that were miles away might have survived, but most had seen enough to fear the worst.

Most ranchers couldn’t tune into the evening news that dismal night because their power was off, so they didn’t hear that the National Weather Service had named the storm Atlas. In Rapid City, NWS was staffed by dedicated meteorologists who’d walked through drifts to get to their stations, even though they were on unpaid leave due to a government shutdown in Washington, D.C.

~

SMALL CHURCHES are scattered across the West River countryside. Tiny Milesville is down to just one residence, and the post office closed last year, but it still has two churches.

Roads were impassable so the pews were empty Sunday morning, Oct. 6. Ranchers climbed into the cabs of their biggest tractors and started trails through the deep snows so they could search for their stock. As the sun rose, the snow took on a blue glow because it was so heavy with preciptation. County and state highway workers began to clear the roads, and they were sickened by the number of dead cattle they were finding.

Electricity was still off, but REA linemen were immediately in the country, replacing poles and reconnecting broken wires.

The Basels and their neighbors rounded up 700 cows and began the task of sorting them by brands. Their tiny grandson was just beginning to string words together; his first phrase was”dead cow there.”

Cammack is a state legislator, one of three who represent District 29, a big swath of West River that was in the heart of the storm. His fellow district lawmakers, Dean Wink and Larry Rhoden, also ranch near the center of the storm. All three had cattle to find, but they spent time on the phones, consulting with state and county authorities about the recovery.

Words are seldom the measure of a man in rural South Dakota, especially not the quantity spoken. In hard times, a South Dakotan is likely to speak even less than normal so the three rancher/lawmakers filled a vacuum, and became spokesmen even though they had their own sorrows to sort through.

The national media was calling. The blogosphere erupted both with sympathy and stupidity.”Why didn’t they get the cattle indoors,” asked one urbanite. Comments like that were read and heard by the struggling ranchers who already were dealing with myriad emotions.

ìIt’s one of those things when if you come over the hill and you see dead cows dotted over the prairie, your first thought is it’s your responsibility to take care of those livestock,” said Cammack.”I don’t think there’s one person whose first thought was about their equity. Their first thought was that they’d failed their stewardship responsibility to those animals.”

Cammack told the New York Times and other reporters that ranchers mustn’t blame themselves.”That’s easy to say and hard to do,” he added.”There is not a producer who didn’t question himself 20 times a day.”

In the days following the storm, Gary Cammack had his own ranching disaster to deal with, but he also had responsibilities as a state legislator.

Cammack said one of the best livestock lessons he ever heard came years ago from Robert Funnel, a neighbor and the father of Tammy Basel.”I’d lost a couple head of cattle and Robert told me that one of the things that kept him in business was ëyou got to step over the dead ones and take care of the live ones.'”

At the Reinhold ranch, the parents and six children tried to keep a perspective. At one point, they stopped the search to reflect on what had happened.”We prayed that while the horses’ and cows’ paths had ended, ours must continue on,” Larry said.

And then they continued to look for survivors. They found live cows, buried to the neck in wet, cold snow, and they dug them out by hand and shovel. Twenty-five horses were nowhere to be found.”In our heads we knew they were probably gone,” said Rachel. But you search with your heart.

Finally, on Wednesday morning she and Molly found the last bunch. They were strung out in a long line on the prairie, a few hundred yards apart, for several miles.

It’s one thing to lose cows with numbered ear tags, said their father, but it can’t compare with losing horses named Cocoa, Sweetheart, Marigold, Okey and Rosie.

ìThey were like our best friends,” said Rachel, Rainbow Ranch’s head wrangler.”We lost 21 really good saddle horses.” One of them was Champion, a 6-year-old given to her brother Caleb for his birthday.

Rachel, the eldest of the Reinhold children, led her horse Pocokota through deep drifts as she looked for missing cows and horses. The four-day search ended with a heart-breaking discovery.

The final count was 91 horses dead, and 140 still alive. But the living horses also suffered.”They looked dazed, just like us, walking around kind of staring even weeks later,” said Larry.”Some of their bunch aren’t there. They had their buddies and they’re gone.”

One month after the storm, State Veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven reported that 13,977 cattle had been confirmed dead, along with 1,257 sheep, 287 horses and 40 bison. Some cattlemen think the losses might be twice that number, but it’s likely that a lot of ranchers won’t report their numbers unless the federal government approves a disaster relief program.

Oedekoven also said that while some of the livestock drowned in swollen creeks and dams or were simply buried in snow, many died from hypothermia. The cold rain and biting wind, followed by a two-day blizzard was three strikes.

Hypothermia eventually stresses the cardiovascular system to the breaking point. Before that happens, however, it can cause a creature — man and beast — to become confused and disoriented. That may explain why cattle and horses left shelter and drifted for miles before collapsing, usually in stride with their hind legs stretched out behind them, still pushing onward.

~

THE AFTERMATH OF the Cattleman’s Blizzard won’t be written for a long time. The impacts, both financially and psychologically, are impossible to predict.

Most of the ranchers who suffered losses are third or fourth generation stockmen, and while they’ve never experienced a deadly blizzard like 2013, they have perservered through decade-long droughts, depressed prices, diseases, floods and grass fires.”Quit” is a four-letter word they don’t know.

ìWe don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, over coffee at her kitchen table six weeks after the blizzard.”I say that in the most sincere and joking way. Most of us would hardly know what to do with ourselves if we had a 40-hour, $40,000 a year job in town.”

A number of ranchers lost two-thirds of their cows, and for some that was the bulk of their net equity because many lease land from the government, from relatives or from strangers who’ve invested in cowboy country, sometimes for the hunting rights.

Everybody feels badly for the youngest ranchers who were just beginning to build a cow herd in an era of record-high prices for cows. But most ranchers can also point to a neighbor nearing retirement who doesn’t have much land and probably lacks the time or energy to start over.

ìThe effects will be felt 10 years from now and we will lose families,” said Cammack, the state legislator.”The biggest hope is with all the folks in Washington that represent us.” In the blizzard of 1996-97, when losses were far less, cattle and sheep producers received payments that covered about 65 percent of their losses.

ìThere’s only so much a bank can do with today’s regulations,” he said.”From a state perspective, there are some things we need to consider, maybe some loan guarantees or interest buydowns. If we can only help six or 10 families that’s still something.” Six or 10 families in Meade County covers a lot of territory.

The most immediate aid sprang from a Rancher’s Relief Fund organized by farm groups and the Black Hills Community Foundation. Donations neared $1 million by Thanksgiving week, and even though losses are probably 20 or 30 times that amount the generosity of strangers buoyed the spirits of the cattlemen. (The Rancher’s Relief Fund closed on May 31, 2014, having accumulated $5.4 million in donations).

Daily life was also returning to some sense of normalcy. Union Center’s basketball gymnasium reverberated in late afternoons with ball dribbling. Livestock auction barns at Faith and Philip were selling the spring calves that survived the storm, usually for more than $2 a pound — a thousand dollars a head.

The churches were open again on Sundays, and for weddings and funerals. When life turns abnormal, the normalcies are safe refuges.

Larry Reinhold, who had Bible School training before he returned to the family ranch, is a regular speaker at churches and religious gatherings. He once conducted a burial at the Piedmont Cemetery for an old neighbor who had a limestone quarry. Quoting Laura Ingalls Wilder, he reflected that the prairie has already claimed our blood so it might as well take our bones.

Reinhold recalled that particular eulogy as he talked about the October storm. Wilder was an East River farmer’s daughter, but she must have also endured some losses to so aptly describe the sentiments of the survivors of the Cattleman’s Blizzard.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Making Hay

By Linda M. Hasselstrom

Whenever I glanced toward the highway, its glare nearly blinded me. Profiled faces were silhouettes in stone behind winking windshields. I wanted to scream in their ears, or maybe whisper to startle them. I wanted to make those drivers jam their right foot hard on the brakes, jerk their sunglasses off, and look out over the dusty alfalfa fields where I sat on my tractor, yelling.

There I was in the hayfield, 47 years old, bouncing along eating dust on a little 420 John Deere tractor my father bought on my 14th birthday. The 420 was our newest tractor, making it an antique to equipment salesmen, which explained why they hadn’t called us lately. To pass time, I imagined what I’d say if someone actually stopped to talk. Conditions weren’t conducive to reasoned discourse.

Pay attention! I’d bellow. I’m doing this so you can eat! In a rational tone, I’d add that you should watch out for folks like me as you drive the highways in your air-conditioned car. Look for the man, woman, or child on a tractor, hat pulled low, and back bowed to the blazing sun. Trying to drive the pleading tone from my voice, I’d add that we’re making hay to fill the bellies of calves out on the hillside, to feed them fat through a long, cold winter.

What do you care? My voice might rise, my throat tighten. You’ll be snug in your houses and offices when the blizzards arrive, or edging along the highway again, cursing the ice and yourself for forgetting snow tires. We’ll be out here, in bone biting cold, riding the same Popping Johns and loading the hay we’re cutting now. We’ll be here, muscles straining to lift the pitchfork full of hay, to pitch it off the rack for cows running behind. Every effort we make is manufacturing beef. We do this so you can fill your bellies.

One day you’ll go to the supermarket and choose a fine cut of steak, juicy and red, or shape hamburger to fry, mouth watering as it pops in the pan; if you’re watching your cholesterol, you’ll drain the grease. You can do this because we’re here, in this hot noon, making hay. If you can’t see us as you drive by, imagine our squint into the sun, which burns those grimaces against dust and heat into lines our faces will wear all our lives. When you see us in town, and notice how old we look, you shake your heads and wonder why we put up with such a hard life. Or grin and remark that we’ve never heard of makeup.

Listen to me. I’ve spent 10 hours on this tractor today, the engine popping steadily, deafening; the muffler fell off years ago. It’s 104 degrees, with a wind blowing gritty dust into my teeth. I’m not doing this just because I’m not smart enough to get a job in town.

I began driving the mower tractor the year I turned 14, proud to replace, with my skinny body, the unreliable hired men. Each year I relearn intricate steps to start the motor because the generator didn’t last past my 16th birthday. I tighten bolts like the one that whizzed past my ear last summer, check connections, hydraulic fluid, mower parts. Sweat runs out from under my hat, stings my eyes, makes me think there’s a wasp in my pant leg.

Making hay in summer is mental and physical torture, and traditional as religious rites. My parents, with my husband and me, spent 10 years together operating a small family ranch in western South Dakota. My father, whose father left the shoe making profession in Sweden to homestead this land in the late 1800s, was conservative politically and economically. His primary rule of ranch management was “Never Spend Any Money.” Translated into practicality, that meant we never spent a dime for anything we could do ourselves.

Making hay with old equipment meant we were using outdated methods, and were never typical representatives of high-tech “agribusiness,” a terrible word for an evil trend. None of us owed anyone money; we paid our taxes on time. Both couples took vacations yearly — not all of our neighbors with shiny new air-conditioned tractors could make those claims. But many of them have done less labor as they moved into the modern age. First they bought a “side delivery” rake, a long implement with rotating toothed wheels that swept the hay into queues the length of the field, making big, even hay bundles.

Meanwhile, we drove an old tractor towing a short dump rake. This model of tractor, designed with its two front wheels close together, was known for its ability to kill ranchers. When I hit the throttle, it leapt in the air, looking around for a hole to drop its front wheels into so it could tip over and break my neck. I never flipped it, but the summer a neighbor used it to put up our hay when I was occupied elsewhere, he rolled it twice on flat ground and survived. On later models, the front wheels are set nearly as far apart as car wheels for greater stability.

To use our old dump rake, I sat sideways on the rusty metal seat, steering with my left hand while I looked over my left shoulder to gauge when the rake teeth filled with hay. At that moment — and before the rake began to slide over hay on the ground — my right hand yanked hard on a rope that pulled a lever and dumped the hay. After an hour, my neck and shoulders hurt from twisting to watch the rake behind and the tractor’s path ahead — and I’d usually hit a couple of holes or boulders. My hand was blistered; and my arm ached from pulling the dump rope.

A few years after I started haying, the neighbors bought a windrower, a top-heavy machine that mowed hay in swathes 12 feet wide, gathering it in the same operation, and leaving neat rows around the field. The operator sat high on the machine where he could look down on me, probably chuckling, as I tightened bolts and greased zerks on my old 9-foot mower. I’d climb on the tractor and mow around and around the field three hours, unless I broke a sickle tooth, or mower guard, or a bolt snapped.

Then I’d unhook the mower, attach the rake, and drive around in circles for another couple of hours to windrow my hay. Meanwhile, the neighbor started piling hay while I was still mowing, unless he was smart enough to mow another field and let the crop dry out a day before stacking. If he wasn’t, his haystacks sometimes burst into flames, spontaneous combustion, because it was stacked too green. In fairness, he might have admitted that I didn’t break down any more often than he did. To be really fair, he might have admitted that buying advanced machinery used up a lot more of his cash than we spent repairing our old equipment.

Once hay is mowed and raked, a variety of machinery exists for making the big loaf-shaped piles common to the arid Great Plains. In our case, when I’d half-raked a field, I’d see a glint of light through the dust as the massive old John Deere carrying the hydraulic stacker moved into the field. It’s simplest to describe a stacker as a wheeled fork; the teeth operate hydraulically to raise the load to the height of a stack.

My father would drive to a far corner of the field and drop the teeth flat against the ground, then drive toward the spot where he intended to place the first stack. As he drove, trying not to stick the metal teeth in a hole that would bend them, the hay would collect against the back wall of the fork. When he got to the stack site, he’d stop and back up, pushing a lever that caused the push-off to slide the hay off the fork tips. Then he’d turn and drive at a right angle to the rows of hay, returning to pile each load on the first.

Stacking my father’s way, however, was much more complex than simply shoving hay into a pile. His progress around the field on the noisy stacker was more like a ballet: he never drove a foot more than necessary to collect the hay and bring it back to the stack. As he delivered hay from alternating directions, he dumped each load so the end crossed the end of a previous load, weaving strips of fodder together at the corners. Integrating the bundles this way made the finished stack firmer. Every three or four loads, he’d lift the teeth enough to dump hay into the center of the square, building it high so it wouldn’t collect water in a depression that would rot hay from the core outward. The finished stack might have been shingled, so rightly did the bundles overlap one another, and would shed water for years. Such stacks were also incredibly hard to tear apart with a pitchfork.

The neighbors’ next innovation was a device I never envied: a four-paneled fence set up on the site of each stack. Using a stacking fork, they simply dumped hay casually over the fence until it made an untidy pile my father refused to dignify with the term “stack.” Then they unhooked the fence connections and dragged the panels to the next site. The hay pile was uneven, haphazard, without layering or the woven corners that would resist wind, snow and water, and much smaller than the monster loaves in our fields.

The neighbors defended this technique by saying they’d feed the hay that winter anyway, so it didn’t have to last. The same philosophy has created an entire throwaway economy. And, to continue the social parallel, a lot of the hay blew away before it was used. If we had a wet summer and fall, it was already rotting when they fed it in January. Sometimes it made cattle sick, or killed them. If we didn’t feed our stacks during the first winter we knew they’d last awhile.

One winter when I was 40, we tore into a stack built the summer I turned 15. My father used another hydraulic gadget on the tractor to feed hay: the grapple fork. Visualize a hand raised to catch a ball: the curved “fingers” could be raised as the operator drove straight into the stack. Then the fingers closed, holding the hay firmly against the row of bars on the bottom, just as you might pick up a handful of spaghetti. The outside of the 25-year-old stack was weathered gray, a pile of leafless sticks that had shed water like a palm thatched roof in the tropics. Inside, the hay was green and leafy, and smelled as if it was fresh cut. I wouldn’t believe it either, if I hadn’t stood on the hayrack and pitched it off to cows that filled their bellies with it.

Summer haying was only part of a year-round cycle that turned grass and hay into meat. All winter, either with a tractor, or with a pitchfork and his pickup, my father fed to his cows the hay we put up during the summer. Driving in the country on some March morning, watch for pickups with miniature haystacks in the back moving slowly through pastures along the highway. Look again; the pickup has no driver. The rancher stands in back pitching hay. Behind him, cows stream from all corners of the pasture. New calves, confused by all the action, run back and forth, bawling. When they find their mothers, they curl up to sleep on a ton of hay, until a cow eats it out from under them.

One of my friends tells a story typical of this method of feeding hay. One day her dog, left in the pickup cab, managed by his bouncing around to lock both doors. As the pickup headed down a steep hill, she ran alongside trying to pry open the wing window to get at the steering wheel, and hoping no neighbors drove by. The dog barked encouragement, and the pickup eventually hit a rock big enough to stop it, whereupon she broke the side window and resumed control. She’s trying to teach the dog to unlock doors and turn off the ignition, but heís old and she doesn’t have much hope he’ll learn these new tricks.

One of ranching’s skills is figuring out in the fall how long the hay and winter will last before pasture grasses grow green and tall enough in spring to support the herd. Ranchers who don’t keep surplus hay in case they guess wrong can be ambushed by spring blizzards. Entire cattle herds have died when the rancher miscalculated when winter would be finished with him.

In fall, ranchers sell calves six to nine months old; most are bought by feedlot operators who will maintain them through another winter, usually on grain, to produce the fat meat sold to supermarket chains. Some ranchers keep half their calves through another winter, hoping prices will be higher next spring. Meanwhile, each cow protects another calf in her womb.

The meat a rancher eats is nothing more than grass and hay, conveniently packed inside cowhide. By the time meat appears wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store, additional processes have raised the price far above the rancher’s costs or profits. Large companies feed expensive, chemical-laden grain, and use hormones to increase weight gain. Cattle that spend months crammed together in a feedlot that may be wet and muddy also receive medication to help the withstand disease, and you also pay for butchering and wrapping, tracking — dozens of other costs.

Increased concern about what we eat has made some changes. A customer who looks hard enough may find grass-fed beef. Cows are ruminants, after all, and like elk, moose and deer, they prefer to wander wide grasslands, selecting their own meals based on their needs. Old-fashioned ranchers like us try to accommodate their natural needs. We use hay only as a winter supplement when natural feed is covered by snow and unavailable. I refuse to eat supermarket beef. Grass-fed meat is healthier. And while chewing a steak, I can picture the hours of haying from which its firm, tasty flesh is made.

Editorís Note: Linda M. Hasselstrom lives and writes at Windbreak House near Hermosa. This is revised from the July/August 1998 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 1-800-456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Carcasses in the Creek, Noem in a Box

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I don’t spend snowy spring nights shoulder-deep in cows’ hindquarters trying to save balky calves. I’m not spending this October trying to get a tractor through a muddy, washed-out pasture to drag fifty rotting carcasses that used to be my mortgage payment out of a poisoned creek.

But I am being asked by Congresswoman Kristi Noem, as are you, to pay for a “safety net” to make sure blizzards and other bad fortune don’t put West River ranchers out of business. That makes their business our business.

It’s hard to read the numerous accounts of ranch hardship following the pummeling, freakish West River blizzard of the October 4 weekend and not want to leap to the aid of our neighbors who saw their livelihood turn to horrible scenes of animal suffering and death. The urge to help is all the greater because the people suffering fit the South Dakota self-image in which we all look like Ronald Reagan in Cattle Queen of Montana.

But why should we want to increase federal spending on (call it what it is) welfare when our Congresswoman has urged us to spend less on other needy Americans? She voted against federal assistance for people who lost homes and businesses in Hurricane Sandy last October. Silly New Jerseyans — they shouldn’t have built so close to the ocean, right? Rep. Noem has stalled the Farm Bill because she wants to cut food stamps, a program she claims (erroneously) is rife with waste and fraud.

If we’re really worried about waste and fraud, let’s consider the case for the livestock indemnity program that Rep. Noem advocates. Suppose a thousand ranchers lost livestock in this month’s blizzard and would apply for federal assistance. Would we not find among that thousand at least a few who find themselves in dire straits in part because of their own choices, say, a decision to leave their cattle out on fall grass a week longer or to switch to fall calving? Would we not find, say, 12 out of 1,000 ranchers (that’s the SNAP overpayment rate due to recipient “error”) who would take advantage of Rep. Noem’s generosity and round their losses up from 95 head to 100, or 150 to 300?

Dare we expand the welfare state and risk rewarding a few bad actors and bad choices?

When we look at the carcasses in the creek, and the honest tears welling in a rancher’s eyes, the answer is simple: heck yes! Help our neighbors; write the checks.

But if we try to take Congresswoman Kristi Noem’s words and votes seriously, we end up in a Republican box, where we can’t spend money we don’t have on lazy takers who should have known better than to try to raise cattle in South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

South Dakotans Will Survive

The statewide concern for South Dakota’s West River stockgrowers warms the heart. Despite that big river, we are one state and that is especially obvious in times like this.

Most of us who live in East River have friends, relatives, customers or associates of some sort out West. As Lt. Governor Matt Michels often jokes, South Dakota is big enough to qualify as America’s 15th largest city — if we were all crowded into one big city from Buffalo to Dakota Dunes.

You might think that we would lose the camaraderie of a city, with our 820,000 people spread out over 77,000 square miles. But attend a Jackrabbit or Coyote football game (or better yet a Jackrabbit vs. Coyote game) and you’ll soon know that we have a lot in common. You can get the same lesson during deer season, or the legislative session, or countless other occasions.

We learned it again last week when cold rains doused the sheep and cattle on the West River rangeland, followed by a blizzard now called Atlas that buried the already-freezing and weakened livestock in as much as three feet of wind-driven snow.

Nothing tightens the chest of a rancher more than the sight of an animal lying dead, and it’s far less about money than the simple fact that he or she feels like the guardian of the herd. When adversity hits — even something as impossible to fight as a blizzard called Atlas — the cattleman or sheepherder feels responsible and wonders what might have been done differently.

Catastrophes are always that way.

The October 2013 blizzard was exceptional in its fury, and because it arrived when calves are usually still warming themselves in the autumn sun. But South Dakotans are blizzard survivors.

Exactly 100 years ago, a horrible blizzard blanketed all of South Dakota. The Perry family, new homesteaders, were traveling to their ranch about 10 miles east of Rapid City when the storm hit.

Mr. and Mrs. Perry and four of their nine children were in a wagon. The older children went ahead on horseback. They became separated in the blinding snow.

The bodies of the parents and the four younger chldren were found by the wagon the next day, a quarter-mile from the farmhouse. The other children survived and they made burial plans for a funeral that attracted much attention.

One visiting journalist attended and upon seeing the six coffins in the snow he wrote,”In a little cemetery out on the edge of the Black Hills, where men hunt gold, they have just dug the longest, widest, deepest grave in the great West. In that one grave lie a father, mother and four children — the most touching sacrifice offered up to the great blizzard which has just swept this bleak waste of the Middle West.”

The journalist meant well but he hardly understood this land, and its appeal. We are one community, tied together by pheasants and deer, by a 35-day legislature, a web of wild rivers, mountains and flatlands and hills in between — and by cows and sheep. And tied together mostly by a people who like the freedom of space under a big sky.

For 124 years, the citizens before us have come together to overcome floods, droughts, tornadoes, fires, depressions and blizzards.

Fortunately, in this latest challenge, we didn’t lose any human life to the storm. But some of our friends from the western side might very well lose their livelihoods.

A number of organizations are raising funds to help the ranchers hardest hit. If you have a few dollars, one of the best places to send a check would be the Black Hills Community Foundation, Box 231, Rapid City, S.D. 57701. Make it out to the Ranchers’ Relief Fund.

Updated 10/17: We’ve now learned that four South Dakotans did lose their lives in accidents or misfortunes related to the storm in western South Dakota. The four families have our heartfelt sympathy for their losses.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Finding Support After the Storm

By Laura Andrews

Last week’s blizzard was devastating to South Dakota’s cattlemen and women, with livestock losses estimated in the tens of thousands. It’s hard for outsiders to understand the impact — both financial and emotional — that this will have on West River ranchers. Joan Wink of Howes, South Dakota said,”There are no words to describe the devastation and loss. Everywhere we look there are dead cattle. I’ve never seen so many.”

Here are a few sites that offer insight into the impact as well as concrete ways to help those affected:

Posted on by — Leave a comment

From the Prairie

Jodene Shaw shared these photos from her ranch near White Owl in central Meade County. Shaw works at home on the ranch as a wife, mother of three kids, mixed media artist and photographer. She also incorporates photographs into collage art that can be purchased in her Etsy shop online.

“My Grandma Marj was a nature photographer and a birdwatcher. She shared both of those passions with me when I was a child. It has only been in the past three years that I have developed my love for art and photography into a business,” Shaw says. “My favorite subjects to photograph are wildflowers, birds, and rural life, and my family. My artwork weaves together my loves for faith in God, the beauty of nature and rural life, words, photography, and finding the sacred in ordinary.” View more of her work here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Colts on Matt Ranch

Michele Schweitzer shared these photos from Matt Ranch near Red Owl. Cliff and Judy Matt own the ranch. Hired man Grady Gifford is shown working with a couple of the ranch’s colts.

“I am always put in a seat of respect and amazement when you see someone so great in what they do and humble in their position,” Schweitzer says. “What really gave me thought is how hard the South Dakota rancher works. Both Cliff and his hired man had been out since 5:00 a.m. haying. It was now approaching 6:00 p.m. and Grady had to break a couple colts. No supper yet, no complaints. It was just work to be done and there were more chores to follow.”

Schweitzer lives in Mobridge. View more of her photos at picsbymicimages.com.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Singing Across South Dakota

South Dakota’s newest country music talent performs in Yankton next Thursday (May 23). Rehme Sutton, who grew up on a ranch near Burke, has just debuted her first album and she included a stop in Yankton as part of a home-state tour.

The free show begins at 9 p.m. at Yankton’s newest music venue, Rounding Third (aka Robbie’s Little Casino) on Third Street. Everyone is invited to attend.

The Sutton name is synonymous with rodeo, ranching and politics in South Dakota. All those traditions are part of Rehme’s music.

Her grandfather Billie Sutton was a state legislator who ran for lieutenant governor, and her brother Billie was a college rodeo star before he was badly injured by a bronc several years ago. Fortunately, he survived and is now a state senator. He’s the subject of “Billie’s Song,” the finale of his sister’s album, “Long Road Home.”

Rehme has a passion for singing and guitar-playing that comes through loud and clear in her stage performances. Mix that with a deep love of her home state, and the result is a musical freshness that is gaining attention across the country.

Her itinerary includes the following stops.

STURGIS — May 21 at the Knuckle

FORT PIERRE — May 22 at the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center

YANKTON — May 23 at Rounding Third, 9 p.m.

BURKE — May 25 at Stella’s