Not all farming days are good days.
Twin Gentle Giants, Shat Acres Rob and Roy returned home today from their summer pasture. Rob said he was sorry for smacking Ray’s head with his 66” horn spread. Roy's are even larger at 67". According to Rob, it was an accident. It is always a challenge to get these two steers into and unloaded from the trailer. Weighing over a ton each, you don’t just whistle for them to come like a dog. If you can convince one of them to jump into the trailer, that first one in pretty much fills the trailer. Then brother has to climb in, joining his twin. Luckily the trip home is less than a mile. Rob and Roy are so bonded that we cannot make two trips, leaving one behind.
Through the years, Rob and Roy have brought so much joy to so many. Born July 6, 2019, Rob and Roy are castrated bulls. They might have been beef on another farm, but they got a buy as Ray’s pets. Ray says they work for us because Farm Tour visitors and Highland House Farm Stay guests love feeding them apples and carrots. Rob and Roy’s dam is Shat Acres Raisin Pie, who herself is a special cow. In over 58 years of raising Highland Cattle, Raisin Pie is our only cow that ever had two sets of twins. Her this year's twin black bull calves, Green Mountain Boys Shat Acres Ethan and Allen, were born May 19, 2024.
Getting Rob and Roy home was the culmination of another busy farming day. They all are. The day started out with the forty-mile commute to our other farm in Greensboro Bend, VT. There we cleaned out the remaining items from the farmhouse on the property we closed on today, with the Vermont Land Trust. The house was swept clean for the new owners.
It was a bitter-sweet day. This was Ray's 178-acre home farm that his father purchased in 1964 to raise his beloved Highland Cattle on. Ray lived with and cared for his parents there until they passed in 2008 and 2009. Selling this farm was not an easy choice, but it was just too much to manage two farms forty miles apart, with no employees. The only way Ray was willing to part with this farm, was knowing it will be preserved forever in agriculture and for public access hiking trails.
Ray and Farmer Tom then castrated four Highland/Shorthorn bulls for our beef market. With selling the Greensboro Farm, all cattle from that farm need to be rehomed to our Plainfield farm. The first to leave were four large steers. They were loaded onto the trailer, brought to the Plainfield farm and unloaded uneventfully into the pasture with our bull Rocky and his women.
The next task was to bring Rob and Roy home, because with the cold weather, their water had frozen overnight. The boys of summer will return to their pasture as soon as the grass is lush and green.
That is, if they are willing to get back into the trailer.
We were reminded again that not all farming days are good days. Today was one of the good ones. We accomplished several of the tasks needing to get done, and Rob and Roy are safely back home. Not quite so for Ray, but it could have been much worse.