How wrong I had been. By the time the barn was finished in the fall of 1962, the price of milk was lower than ever. We had the cows, counting 20 bred heifers, that we had been counting on, and they were debt free. But I had had it.
“If I can’t get a reasonable price out of my product,” I told Helen, “the devil with it. I quit.”
I shut the doors on the new barn, never milked in it, and as the dairy cows began freshening, one by one, I left them in the pasture with the calves. The only trouble was, 15 percent of the calves couldn’t take the rich milk of the dairy cows, and so died. The rest, however, got terribly fat in a short time and I anticipated good prices.
What a disappointment it was when I took them to market. The milk fat dairy calves brought five cents a pound less than choice-bred beef calves. “Well,” I thought, “I can lick that. I’ll put a black bull on them.” The next year the vitality of the calves was improved somewhat; but not the price.
“The solution is simple,” Helen said. “We’ve got the right grass. Now just find the right cattle.”
That night, still kicking the thing around, Helen, Connie and Andy and I were in the den before the fireplace. Our thoughts were on the future program – the next “Five-Year Plan,” but we were silent. I glanced around the walls… Helen and I had paneled them with knotty pine bought out of the last good corn crop we’d raised before the droughts. Hanging on the wall were paintings dad had done, paintings of Texas ranch scenes of space, brassy sky, horses and the caprock country. My eye wandered to another picture – a huge photograph of dad, taken when he was 18 years old. He was holding a massive Hereford bull named Repeater 7th Model. Faded ribbons under the glass attested the fact that “Pete” was first place senior yearling at the 1917 Missouri State Fair and The American Royal. The picture reminded me of a snapshot in the family album. It was of the big old barn “Papa” built, with great letters on the south side proclaiming, “Farmer and Son Herefords.”
“You know,” I mused, “We have been raising the wrong kind of cattle. Like this, for instance. We have a weak calf, so to raise her, we bring her into the house, if we have to, and feed her by hand, pamper her and shoot her full of drugs. Then we shelter and feed her for the rest of her life, and we have to take care of her calves exactly the same way. Some of them don’t live, even at that.
“So we are compounding the original weakness. That’s what we have done, generation after generation in our registered cattle and in cattle raised in farming country. Take old Pete, there. He was a whale of a bull, but I remember dad saying they hauled a Holstein cow around to the fairs and he was still nursing when he was 18 months old.”
Helen asked, “Remember your trip to the JA Ranch?” “How do they manage cattle on a huge ranch like that?” Helen asked. “If we lose as many calves as we do, it looks like they would lose all of the calves born on the range.”
“My eye,” I said. “Those cattle are bred up from the original Longhorns on the Great Plains. They are tough. Only the fittest survive.”
Only the fittest survive. The phrase ran through my mind again and again. Then, something stirred in the back of my mind. I hauled my copy of the Farm Quarterly’s “The Good Life” off the mantle, turned to page 111 and a story titled, “Texas Cattle Man.” It had been written, I recalled, by Grant Cannon, photographed by Fred Knoop.
The story, as I had remembered it, was centered abound the Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company between Gutherie and Dickens, Texas. A 176,000 acre “reputation” ranch and one of the oldest ranches in Texas, the Pitchfork “was put together and the brand was established by Powers and Savage about 10 years after the Civil War and was taken over by D. B. Gardner and Eugene F. Williams of St. Louis in 1882, the story reminded me. After re-reading the story, I looked long and hard at the pictures. Two things in particular interested me: No. 1, a group of cows milling in a corral; I liked their quality. No. 2, the picture of the ranch manager, D. Burns, seated at his desk, a quizzical smile on his cherubic face. And, as I looked at D. Burns’ picture I recalled my first thoughts the years before when I first read the story and looked at the picture. “There,” I had said, “is an honest man.”
I returned to the telephone. “Operator,” I said, “get me Mr. D. Burns, Pitchfork Ranch, Guthrie, Texas.”
In due time, a woman’s voice said, “Pitchfork Ranch.”
“D. Burns, please,” the operator said.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but Mr. Burns is at the Flagg Ranch in Wyoming,” and she gave the number. The Flagg Ranch, I was to learn, was a 32,000 acre extension of the Pitchfork where yearlings are shipped for fattening.
D. Burns, with his Texas drawl, came to the phone, and I introduced myself and told him what I wanted. “I’ll sell you some cows,” he said. “We’ll be shippin’ early in November.”
“How much,” I asked. “will you take for 100 good old cows in calf?”
“One hundred and thirty a head,” he said.
“Mr. Burns, I will see you on the 5th day of November. Good night.”
That day dawned bright and clear in the Texas Panhandle. The first rays of day caught my father and I southbound. Dad lives in Memphis, about 100 miles north of Guthrie, and we’d left Helen at dad’s. Connie and Andy had stayed home to tend the farm.
D. Burns, looking not a day over 50 but nearing 70, stepped to the door. He stood six feet tall, about 180 pounds, dressed in high-heeled boots, twill pants and jacket. The crown of his Stetson was soiled from sweat and dust.
“So you are Mr. Farmer,” he said. “Welcome to the Pitchfork.” He shook my hand, and dad’s, then introduced us to a big, jovial man at a typewriter in an office cluttered with saddles and bridles, chaps and spurs and two big, framed topographical maps of the ranch. “Meet Jim Humphreys,” D. Burns said. “He’s assistant manager.”
Shortly, Dad and I were in D.’s big car, tooling across Pitchfork pastures. As we drove, D. Burns said, “How did you hear about us?”
“Read a story in Farm Quarterly,” I said, “and saw your picture. I thought you looked honest and decided to do business with you.” D. Burns blue eyes twinkled. “Shoot,” he said, “I’ll cheat you out of your eye balls.”
I chuckled, knowing I hadn’t been wrong. I explained my theory on cattle, the pampering and compounding of weak genes, the belief that range cattle were products of survival of the fittest.
D. pointed out several cows obviously springing. “I think I can pick you out 100 cows and you will get 90 calves. Or it will cost you $1 a head for a test.”
“Calfhood vaccinated?”
“No we didn’t calfhood vaccinate until 1954. These cows were born before that.”
“D.,” I said, “You pick me out 100 cows like these, and forget the pregnancy test. And send me four good old bulls.”
“All right,” he said. “The bulls will cost you $250, just about what they would weigh out.”
Thus ended a pleasant day; and marked the beginning of a new era on our home place. Back home, Helen and I worked our jobs in the day and prepared for the delivery of the cows at night and on weekends. Andy, of course, was 15, and a great help; Connie was in college, a sophomore, and had taken the ring of a 225-pound (he’s great at driving fence posts) football player named Sam Winn. All of us pitching in shaped up the place in a hurry for our “survival-of-the-fittest cows.”
Two things we must have, I knew, were a study loading chute and corral with head gate. Taking no chance on building anything flimsy, Sam, Andy and I felled big oak logs, 24 feet long, to make the chute and corral. It was hard work, but when we finished, we knew no wild range cow would escape.
The cows came Thanksgiving Day, 12 hours late since state troopers had nabbed the truckers for a PSC violation. Missouri is notoriously hard on out-state truckers, much to the detriment of interstate commerce. We unloaded at night, and I knew we were in for an adventurous time; for when we turned the cows into the lot, they stampeded to a head – and stopped, miraculously, right at the fence.
“Thank God they respect a fence,” I breathed. I had visions of them scattering all over the Ozarks.
The most pure delight I ever received on the farm was the day I turned the Pitchfork cows onto the fescue. And, after gnawing at the short buffalo grass, they must have thought they were in cow heaven. They developed a most peculiar grazing pattern; with all four feet planted firmly, they ate the grass in a circle the size of a washtub, right to the ground. The pastures became dotted with these grazed-out circles.
On Dec. 20, sleet hit, and the temperature fell to 17 above zero. I rushed home from work to find Andy anxiously awaiting me. “We’ve got a new calf,” he said.
I gulped. I hadn’t expected any calves yet, and hoped to get into February, when we usually have a warm spell, before any were born. I recalled that sleet and 17 degrees meant instant death for the calves of our other breed – and probably would mean death for a calf of any breed.
I saddled old Buck and rode to the ravine. The snow and wind had stopped, but the temperature settled deep in my bones.”
The first thing I saw as I neared the ravine was the herd, fanned out and nosing for fescue buried in the snow. A few bitten-off tufts indicated they had found it. The dozen or so early calves, milk foam bubbling on their noses, romped together in the snow like lambs.
“So far, so good,” I said. But I wondered what I might find in the ravine.
The sight I saw warmed my insides and sent fleeing forever any doubt that I hadn’t bought “survival-of-the-fittest cows.” Three mother cows, gaunt but bright-eyed, stood guard over new calves, each of them lying curled up on a bed of grass gouged out of the snow, little puffs of steam coming from their pink nostrils. I dismounted and nudged one to its feet, and felt the distended belly. They had dropped, they got up, they suckled.
More important, they had confirmed that, at last, I, this old cow-crazy farmer, had made a “right” decision. These old cows gave me hope that I, too, could survive in the cold world of modern agriculture by borrowing, from the past, on the supreme law of nature, survival of the fittest.
