SAUNA SUIT

It's been a lazy winter of it for me this year, and it's beginning to show around my waistline. There are a couple of contributing factors to this - besides the fact that I like food a little too much for my own good, that is.

For the past number of years I have had my own personal exercise routine. It's called feeding the steers their grain ration. Whether it's forty below in the winter, or forty above in the summer, we go out and fill up to thirty five gallon pails full of raw oats or ground grains (chop) and carry them all over to the feeder pen, then fight our way through big, pushy animals to dump the feed in the troughs. It strengthens back muscles, arm muscles, leg muscles, and it does a nice job of sucking in a flabby tummy too. I can never stick with a exercise workout that I have to set time aside for, but this is different - the animals have to be fed, it's useful work, and it has to be done.

Part of my trouble started last November when we shipped last years feeders. Down the road they went to market, and in came the 2008 calf crop. Only this time Glen decided he was going to try to finish these guys a little cheaper. Grain costs much more than hay, so he thought he'd just start them off on hay and baled green feed, and only use grain later on when they had already got some size to them. What this boiled down to was the end of my calorie-burning chores. Funny how, what with wearing bulky winter clothing, the creeping poundage didn't show itself immediately, but the photos we took in Cuba sure showed up where they settled!

The other major contributing factor in my weight gain is the economic down turn. No really! I know everyone wants to blame it for everything, but it really is affecting my activity levels on this farm! Any other winter I would have gone out after supper and helped Glen feed the bales because it was the only time we had to do it. We both worked all day long. But his job in the oil patch has pretty much come to a grinding halt, so he is home all day, and he gets to do the chores in the daylight. It's a much more civilized way of life, I'll grant you that, but it does nothing in the calorie burning department.

So it was with much relief that I was told he has started working a grain ration into the feeder's diet, and for the first time all winter I went out with him this morning to help him out and see which bins he was using. He's only up to twelve pails per day (for sixty head). Grain is too rich a diet for them to just have everything they can hold right off the bat. You can actually kill animals by giving them too much grain at once.

Being totally out of the loop as far as outdoor chores for the winter went, I dressed for January when I got ready to go out. There's no denying that it's still colder that it should be for March, but it's not THAT cold. Even carrying those few pails had me well warmed up in my old ski-doo suit, but we weren't done yet - next stop was a trip out to the dug out to chop a drinking hole in the ice.

For the past two winters Glen had let the cattle get their water from licking snow, but partly because he's decided that they do better on water, and partly because he's been home to do chores, this winter he has opened an ice hole almost every day. (On the days of forty below the cattle wouldn't leave their shelter for a drink anyway.) Because I had never seen this done and I was curious, I tagged along this morning to check it out. He has been asking me when I plan to take over this job for "my cattle", and I have informed him that April 1st is my day to start. (Surely the winter can't last THAT long!)

It was interesting to watch. He has a "trough" cut in the ice, about 8 inches wide and 2 feet long. The cattle have splashed enough water up and around it while drinking that it has built up a frozen lip of maybe 6 inches of ice framing the hole. Glen used his big ax to chop carefully around the inside of the hole, scooping out the ice chips after one circuit, and breaking through on the second one. He says that it's nothing to do these days with only 4 or 5 inches if ice - it was a half hour job in the dead of winter.

I just watched the action there, but when Glen got back on the tractor to go feed bales I said I'd walk the half mile home. It wasn't but a few hundred feet and I was peeling extra clothing off! There is no melting going on yet, but that March sun was strong on my back, the snow was deep, and I was wearing Glen's big boots. By the time I got back to the house I was wearing my own little personal sauna suit. Obviously I should take that trek on a regular basis.