Working Ranch Magazine January/February 2025

Herefords checked and we changed one of the herds to a different pasture. When I was checking one of the herds, I found some of the neighbors’ cows

(LEFT) Julie and William (Billy) Jensen of J B Herefords LLC pictured along side their daughter Mindy, her husband Kyson, and their three kids. (RIGHT) Great-Grandparents Ray and Selma Jensen

in one of our fields, which is always fun. The neighbor was able to run the cows back across the fence. The fence was in pretty bad shape in a couple of spots so I spent the majority of the morning restretching wire and putting in more t-posts. Good fences make great neighbors! In the afternoon we weighed the recently weaned bulls. We have been selling bulls by private treaty and pride ourselves on providing only the best bulls from our herd. On average we sell around 13 bulls a year out of 140 calves. Along with weighing the bulls we also took a scrotal measurement and put that in our notes. When choosing bulls, they first have to pass our eye test and then we do another cull after we get wean weights, and scrotal, and take a look at the EPD numbers. As the sun went down, I got to feeding calves grain and hay. When checking for calf health, I noticed one steer that was a little slow to come and eat and so he was doctored. I will check him in the morning. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 This morning was cold and foggy. I got the calves fed with their grain and hay, and the one I doctored looked better. The hay was running low, so I put more hay in front of the feed man gers. Every animal in the field looked

good, even with the super cold tem perature. I spent most of the morn ing cleaning up the cut room of the butcher shop. In the afternoon, Bill and Julie helped us run all the recently weaned heifers in, so we could record a wean weight and pick our replace ment heifers. We usually try to keep about 12-20 replacement heifers each year and we are very picky. We keep records of their dams and grand dams as well as the EPDs and choose the best. We also pride ourselves on giving our customers a wonderful selection of heifers for sale. With our replacement heifers in their pen and the “for sale” heifers in theirs, we fed grain and hay for the night. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 I started the day by feeding calves grain and hay. Although monoto nous, it is fun to see the new genetics in these calves. After feeding calves and checking cows in the field, there were no problems, so we could go on with the rest of our day. In ranching, some days really throw you a curve ball, but it’s nice to have a quiet day. With the addition of the butcher shop to the ranch and our animals going through, we have been able to have a lot of suet on hand. My wife and I started researching and learning

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62 I JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2025 WORKING RANCH audited readers run 21 million head of beef cattle.