Even without my accident the weaning and selling would be a little different. That is because one calf was born July 1 and the last calf was born on September 8. They were too young to sell. Or sell and get a decent price for them. So I didn't wean or sell these two calves.
The accident affected my hearing. I lost some hearing in my right ear, but then I am also more sensitive to certain sounds. One sound I found out about was bawling calves when they are being weaned. Weaned calves always seem to bawl for a few days and can be loud. This year they sounded louder and more annoying to me than usual. But Donna told me the calves were sounding the same as usual and they were not louder. But it was very annoying me.
44 second video of the calves crying over to their mothers across the fence when being weaned. This was taken a day or two after they started being weaned so some were starting to temporarily lose their voice as they hadn't quit bawling. https://youtu.be/DToyQ4X9XJg
I hauled the calves down to the auction on October 30, the day before. I wasn't sure how well I would do driving down to Missoula but I did fine. Donna rode with me in case something happened and I would need help.
I was delayed a long time due to a road accident by someone else. Hours earlier a semi-truck's trailer had detached and hit another pickup and crushed it. The accident happened on a narrow section where the mountain started a steep rise in the ditch on one side and the other side of the road only had room for a railroad track. So there was no way to detour around the accident. I ended up sitting there waiting for one hour and 45 minutes. Not fun, especially when one has a trailer full of calves also waiting. Usually the trip takes me two hours to reach the livestock auction, not the 3 hours and 45 minutes it did this time.
I couldn't take all my calves. I figured they wouldn't all fit but I found out I could only fit eight calves in the trailer. Including the two calves I had planned on keeping, I now have five calves still. Over much of November I went back and forth in deciding whether to haul the other three calves to the auction. In the end, partly because I was still recovering and partly because I will have a couple calves anyway to sell in the Spring, I decided to keep the five calves until Spring. We'll see how that goes.
A good side effect of selling late this year is that the last few weeks of October the calf prices stabilized and even went up a few cents. Earlier this Fall, September and the first half of October, the calf prices had really dropped a lot. Even with a slightly high calf price the end of October, I and everyone else selling calves got less money per pound for their calves this year. *sigh*
In the photos, I kept the white faced calf as he was one of the smaller calves as he was born in May. The calf with white on his rear end was sold. He had gained almost as much weight as the other calves even though he had come from a smaller mother. Still, he was not all black. I got twenty-four cents a pound less for him than I did for a larger black steer calf, and usually larger calves sell for a bit less than lighter calves.
Another difference between this year and last year was that my calves weighed more. My calves averaged one hundred pounds more than my calves usually do. I had one calf that weighed 730 pounds, and several weighed 700 pounds each. I never had a calf that weighed more than 600 pounds. These are the first calves from Toby the bull and he produced calves that really gain weight as they were just a normal size when they were born.
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| Mission Mountain view on the drive back home. |
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