Happy New Year!
Hello and Happy New Year from all of us at West Cattle Company! We had such a fun and entertaining Christmas season. Our Christmas season was greeted by record winds and cold nose biting temperatures. This extreme weather makes the work hard, but ranchers don’t get snow days off. If you follow us on Facebook or Instagram, you might have seen Brittany shooting some videos explaining what we do during a storm, and the different strategies and practices we use. Every storm is different and therefore different strategies are constantly being used to feed and care for our livestock.
Although the weather has been harsh, on the positive side, we have received some much-needed winter moisture, which will aid in the spring grass growth. The cows are looking healthy. Brittany has been organizing our processing dates for 2022 & 2023, and believe it or not, these details have to be organized with the processors years in advance.
As a result of getting these details and processing dates organized, we are ready to deliver delicious grass-fed & grass-finished beef to our customers for another year. The year looks bright. We are excited to use our new freezer trailer again this spring as we orchestrate another beef delivery to Ohio.
The beginning of this year has been full of narrowing down the details of shipping our meat to our customers. Our insulated boxes are in, and we are just a few steps away from being able to ship our “bundles” to our customers. This is something that Brittany has worked very hard on, and we are excited to expand our business in new ways to get our beef out to our customers.
We also received our hats, and we are getting ready to launch those for sale on our website! Our kids did a great job modeling the new hats for us. Check out the photos below!
Of course, with every up there is also a down. The last winter storm claimed one of our heifer calves. Its always hard to determine what cause of death is, and it doesn’t matter how much you try to care and look out for your livestock, death is a part of the job. I debated on including this in our blog this month, but in an effort to give all of our followers an open look into our life, we felt this was important, especially for people like us that have young children. While the conversation is difficult, rather than avoiding harsh realities, we like to take these opportunities to talk to our kids about the meaning of life and death. Death is a part of the job when working with animals, just as it is a part of living our everyday lives. This is something that we respect every time one of our animals passes away.
We did not include this part of our lives to bring you down, but to further give you a glimpse into life at the ranch. So many times, people want to only show the good side of things, and while that too is what we will mostly do here, we want to also show the hard side of things as well.
We appreciate all of you out there following us and we hope to be visiting with you in 2022, delivering our pasture raised beef to you, wherever you are.
West Cattle Company
