A vistior for the day

Ryan Goodman from Agriculture Proud is asking today for those of us in the farming and ranching world to share, honestly, how we would do things if someone who was not a farmer or rancher was to follow us around for a day. Wile I would hope that the answer to that question would be we would do nothing different, that is sadly not always the case. I can say for us though we do nothing different, other than go a little slower and explain a lot, when we have visitors to our ranch.

For those that don't know we are located in Northwest New Mexico and we run a commercial Hereford/Angus cross beef cattle ranch. It is not a big ranch by many standards, we are only around 30,000 acres and have 150 head. My husband is the 4th generation on the ranch and that makes our two girls the 5th. We do all the daily work with just our selves and one wonderful man, Alan that works just as hard as we do. When time comes for us to gather, brand or ship that is when we call in reinforcements, mostly family to come and help fill in the extra spots.  It is not always family that comes and helps though as we have hosted some exchange students from Germany and Korea one branding and this year two of our local missionaries came and helped out during shipping time.

Here are our two missionaries. Elder Totten, on the right had never before been around cattle so this was truly a new experience for him.

Elder Hunsaker had never helped work cattle before, but it did not take long before he was an old hand at it though

Even Elder Totten got in the spirit of things before the end of the day

Working cattle in pens and corrals is not the easiest thing to do even with a group of experienced cowboys, add to that two young men who have never worked cattle before and you could be in for a world of trouble. But we look at it as a way to share what we do on a daily basis with someone who would otherwise never have that experience. Showing those outside the ranching industry just what we do on a daily and yearly basis is important. It lets them understand what goes into raising and growing healthy, good quality beef cattle. It also gives us another voice to share our story with those that we may never meet, but they too have a better idea.

I love having new people come around and show them our ranch, it is something I am very proud of. I love answering all their questions about why we do this and why we put cattle in certain places. The answers are always honest, they are sometime hard for people to hear, such as when can't always save every animal that is sick or injured. One thing that I can't wait to start is once I have my own elementary classroom is having the class visit the ranch and see first hand us working with the cattle and sharing with the kids just where it is that the beef they see in the grocery store comes from.

I am proud to be a rancher's wife and I am proud to say that when we have in the past shared that with people we change nothing that we do from when they are not around.

Make sure and stop by Agriculture Proud for a continually update list of other blogs writing about this topic today. We are happy to have you visit!