Cow Chips Introduction

I have never really thought that cows were amusing before the summer of 2009; nor did I ever dream that there was anything to be learned from observing the behavior of cows. Spending a summer unemployed and working on the farm has changed the way I look at the cows that we own; and the way that they relate to my life.

Although my family has been involved in the cattle business my whole life, I have never really had much interest in the cows. My interest has always been in taking care of and operating the farm equipment used to raise and harvest the hay crops used to feed the cows; I would only help with the cows when extra hands were needed. I have always considered the cows to be one of the dumbest animals on the face of the planet and treated them as such. This being the case I have never really wanted anything to do with them.

In June of 2009 I found myself unemployed with no immediate prospects for work. Dad had plenty of projects that needed to be done around the farm, so I spent the summer helping with some of them. Most of the summer was spent in two areas. One was irrigating, and harvesting the hay crops for the coming fall when we would be feeding the cows. The second was replacing the fences on our farm on the Santa Clara River so that we could once again put cows on the property. The fences for this piece of ground had been taken out by a subdivision on the west and the 2005 flood in the Santa Clara River. There had been no cows on the property since the fall of 2004. After the flood in January 2005 this property, known to my family as the St. George field, had been baron until the previous fall when we purchased and installed a sprinkler line and once again planted an alfalfa crop on it. Dad was anxious to get the fences back up so that we could use the alfalfa for pasture and put part of the cows on the property in the coming fall. Building the appropriate fences was a project that I started to really take ownership in. It became my personal project.

Anyone who has ever been involved in building barb wire fences will understand what a project like this can turn into; and I need to explain the process a little bit in order to set up some of the lessons I have learned from the cows. First, do not wear any clothing that you do not want holes in. You cannot work around barb wire for any length of time without destroying your pants, shirts, gloves, or any other article of clothing you might be wearing. Second, you are going to bleed. I had my fair share of battle wounds over the course of the summer. I don’t think that there was a day throughout the whole summer when I didn’t have scratches from building fence. Third, building fence is hard labor. Most days while building fence I did not make it much past noon on the fence. The afternoon usually found me working at one of the many easier tasks that my parents needed done at the house or one of their rentals. Fourth, building fences across the Santa Clara River (creek) is not an easy task. The river bottom is choked with willows, reeds, cotton wood trees and many other plants and weeds. In order to build a fence across the creek, or in my case two different fences, paths had to be cleared by hand through the undergrowth. Finally, you never know how strong the fence needs to be to keep the cows where you want them. Sometimes the strongest fences will not hold, other times, the weakest ones do. These last two points are significant and will come up again later in the book.

After spending the summer working on fences, mangers, corrals and other projects on the property I started to really take ownership of the work that I was doing. For the first time in my life the farm was something more to me. It had always been my dad’s or my brother’s thing in the past, I helped when I could, but never really felt like I had a part in it. That all changed over the summer of 2009. I had worked hard building new fences and repairing old ones around the perimeter of an approximately thirty acre piece of property. I had rebuilt mangers and corrals, cleaned up trash, harvested alfalfa and repaired sprinkler lines among other things. The crowning event took place the first part of October when we brought in nineteen cows and calves and a bull. This was the test to see if my work was in vain, would the fences hold?

This is when the lessons I learned from observing cows started. I started to notice the behavior of the cows, things that I had never paid attention to before. The cows intrigued me; I would tell my family some of the funny things that they do when I would get home. It was one of these conversations around the dinner table that inspired this book. My wife made the suggestion that I write about the experiences so that she could read them. At one point she requested a “book” for Christmas, a book with the stories that I had been telling the family about the cows. Thus, Cow Chips was born, the idea for the name, and many of the stories that I would include were formulated that evening. As I was thinking about the different stories I realized that there was more to it than just amusing stories; I realized that many of the things that I observed caused me to think, and that there were lessons that I have learned about life from my observations.  I decided to make the book more meaningful by sharing the insights about life that I have had occur to me from observing cows. The following is my attempt.