Even my cow herd has been living in the cloud for well over a decade. I’ve been using the same herd-tracking software program since 2011, which is well before I even had a stable internet connection … or a smartphone … or children. Apparently, many things in our lives have changed, but our online herd platform has stayed the same!

When I was young, I kept track of my small cow herd in a coil-bound notebook. As I navigated university and learned to appreciate a good spreadsheet, I started managing herd records through Excel. Over time, we retained multiple daughters from many mama cows, and my spreadsheets got wider and longer than I could make sense of. That’s when I began investigating online options.

Today, there are dozens of programs on the market. Herdtrax (by Telus Agriculture), Go360 bioTrack and Performance Beef are just a few options.

I started with CattleMax, and I haven’t looked back. At the time, I naively didn’t consider important things such as data privacy, company stability and longevity, or adaptability to evolving scale or tag-reading platforms. Luckily for me, CattleMax has continued to adjust over time to meet (or beat) me where I’m at.

Like most programs, there is an annual fee based on the number of animals you track. With that comes a ton of online tutorials, real-time support, and a monthly newsletter where I often learn more efficient ways of tracking information that work for me.

On our farm, we record which dam gives birth to which calf. That information is quickly collected in our calving book at tagging. Later, I enter those animals into the program. From any individual animal record, you can add weights, treatment information, withdrawal times, weaning or sales data. If you retain the female as a replacement, you go on to enter her breeding, preg-checking and subsequent calving information. I can generate reports, still in my beloved Excel, that are easy to customize or print.

You can enter movements from pasture to pasture, and record group data quickly. For example, if I have a pen of replacement heifers that I vaccinate, I can enter the product administered, date, volume, location, person administering it and withdrawal dates just once for an entire group of cattle.

I enter data on a computer or iPhone. For one-time events such as treating a sick animal, I usually tap the info directly into my phone from the pasture. Larger data entry, such as entering our calf crop, I prefer to do at my desk. Avoid entering from a cozy couch where there’s a risk of dozing off and accidentally “moving” every animal you own to your spring heifer calf pasture. This is an oddly specific example, I know.

Time spent, time saved

There are a few downsides to stalking your cattle online. There is an investment in time and the program is only as good as the data you enter.

Our household jokes that CattleMax is little more than a “few clicks of the mouse,” but in reality, it requires a fair bit of time for data entry. On the flipside, we used to spend a long time sifting through papers and files to make lists or find one specific detail, whereas now the answer is at everyone’s fingertips.

As well, the program can help you make informed decisions, but it won’t make the decision for you. There is no data trend, production report or any other metric that beats the value of on-the-ground observation or just plain common sense.

For most of our ranch jobs, we prefer analog. Our saddle horses don’t require a password to operate, our old single-cab stick-shift was built before the internet existed, and our stock dogs don’t know the difference between gigabytes and chew toys.

Yet, after 15 years, I’m still happy with my herd-tracking software. I know where my cows have been, who they’ve been spending time with, who their baby daddies are, and whether they enjoy long walks on the pasture.

I guess there’s room for both.

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To do this, ranchers may use a combination of quads and horses. Some farms don’t have horses at all and rely entirely on quads or bikes. We were the opposite: for the first 20 years of ranching, we moved or gathered our herd exclusively on horseback.

The decision to avoid quads was multifaceted. Partly, it’s because we’re traditional and appreciate the value of stockmanship a horse provides when working cattle. We’ve always had a penful of horses for ranch work. We invested time, energy, money and feed into our horses, and in return, we relied on them solely to help us operate our ranch.

Until last year.

For context, as a side hustle, I occasionally conduct pasture assessments for rangeland organizations. This involves a lot of observation in some of the most remote nooks and crannies of Saskatchewan’s grasslands. Hiking is a big part of the job, but sometimes getting there is tricky. Accessing sites on a pre-existing trail, or fireguard that’s impassable for most vehicles, makes a quad necessary.

After some discussion, we decided that a quad would be a useful addition for range work and might come in handy for other ranch tasks too. My Other Half made some inquiries, decided on a make and model they hoped would last, and came home from the city with “Rhonda.”

She started out shiny and red, and her name is a tribute to her brand.

Some might view adding Rhonda to our mechanical remuda as a shortcut. Others might wonder why we waited so long. After the past year of ranching, riding and quadding, like everything, there are benefits and drawbacks to being a part of the quad squad.

Horses require mindful maintenance, proper nutrition and regular hoof care. That said, Rhonda isn’t maintenance-free. She guzzles fuel, needs filters and oil changes and shows signs of wear and tear.

She has earned her keep, however. While you can’t beat fixing fence on horseback, when it comes to hauling electric fencers, large supplies or cumbersome tools out to spots a truck shouldn’t go, Rhonda comes in clutch.

Another task that Rhonda crushes is targeted weed control. She’s been a shining beacon of invasive weed management. She even helps me knock down annoying weeds around the yard. Horses have many lovely attributes, but applying herbicide isn’t one of them.

And when someone (not me!) leaves the gate open and I find cattle wandering through the yard, Rhonda is ready. A bonus is that the rev of her engine masks the mild cussing I occasionally holler as I encourage the herd to get off my lawn.

We wondered if we’d encounter a shift in mindset when it came to motors, mares and geldings. Would the quad be a little too convenient? Would our horses become idle and lazy while we defaulted to the quad?

For all of her advantages, Rhonda falls short in some categories, particularly in the most meaningful way — she doesn’t have a heart.

You can’t replace a horse. When you’re doctoring a sick animal, navigating a challenging gather or simply enjoying a ride on a late-summer day, the experience is better on horseback because you have a partner with another brain, another set of eyes and their own energy.

Horses teach lessons you can’t learn from a machine. When it comes to choosing horsepower or the power of a horse, I’ll opt for the one with the heartbeat every time.

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It’s not particularly tuneful, and the lyrics will never be mistaken as profound or deep, but summertime anthems don’t care.

The chorus, “If there ever come a time I got rabies, you’re high on my bitin’ list,” has inspired viral videos themed around things people simply cannot stand. I tend to focus on the positives, but this twangy tune has prompted me to think about what would be high on my ranch biting list…

Coming in at number one is invasive weeds. Leafy spurge, downy brome, baby’s breath, absinthe, bindweed, chamomile — the list goes on and on. The threat of invasives can be regional and specific, but also general and widespread.

They’ll infest rangeland, pastures and waterways whether they’re well-managed or not. You can take great pains on your property to prevent and contain weeds, yet wind, water, feed, wildlife, livestock, equipment and other vectors can provide a direct pathway for these detestable plants to infiltrate your land. As a producer, volunteer and (back-in-the-day) professional, I’ve spent way too much time and money scheming, mapping and spraying these plants.

Gophers may be part of the everyday environment, but around here we’ve experienced them in plague-like proportions for about seven years out of the past two decades. This has prompted me to catalogue them on the naughty list.

Speaking of biting, they munch our pastures, hay and annual crops, and they once gnawed the buds out of my new tree saplings. They dig down beside the foundations of our buildings, excavate my garden and build a dangerous network of tunnels, making it almost impossible to ride a horse or drive a pickup across some pastures. The only time I cheered with delight at their antics was when a gopher dined on my newly planted larkspur — the joke was on them, because larkspur is poisonous.

A grasshopper invasion is another thing to index. While they haven’t bothered us as badly this year as they have in the past, I have a very recent recollection of them eating our annual and perennial crops, stripping the tree leaves and even devouring Canada thistle and sagebrush. I have a lot of sympathy for producers who are still fighting the good fight against hoppers. Their damage is swift, whether it’s targeted at seedlings, well-established crops or those ready for harvest.

Last but not least, I’m listing raccoons. They’re cagey, a tiny bit cute and wildly destructive. They’re nimble and bolder than brass. Ironically, raccoons can transmit rabies, so they are more likely to bite me than the other way around. On one of our first dates, my husband introduced me to tactical raccoon management. He spotted a few of the wily wildlife barricaded inside an old building and quickly deployed me as backup.

Twenty-five years later, we’re still collaborating to keep the critters from setting up camp on our ranch. I wonder if our relationship would have flourished if I hadn’t passed the raccoon removal test decades earlier?

Every ranch endures challenges that make us foam at the mouth more than others. To a certain extent, some, like invasive weeds or pesty raccoons, can be managed with proactive prevention. Others, like gopher and grasshopper infestations, are largely out of our control. Even so, our reaction to handling those troubles can be mastered. When things get biting, a positive attitude might be the most effective antidote.

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Brands can be found on nearly everything in our daily lives, from posters and websites to equipment, vehicles and apparel such as sunglasses, hats and bunnyhugs (a.k.a. “hoodies” for my non-Saskatchewan readers). Entire companies are built on the business of branding and promotion, but the inspiration for modern-day brand names had humble beginnings in practical and permanent livestock identification.

Branding calves is an age-old ranching practice rooted in heritage, yet it has real-world relevance today in ranching culture. While some argue branding is outdated, in our experience, it’s a valuable part of management.

We graze cattle in many pastures scattered across several miles. We’ve had to sort our (or others’) critters out of large herds in big pastures. We’ve also had random cattle walk into our yard seemingly out of nowhere. A quick look for a brand is the first step in solving a minor bovine mystery or a major sorting situation.

With present-day technology, there are certainly other ways to identify cattle and mark down who belongs where. We use those methods too. Dangle ear tags, metal ear tags, government-endorsed radio frequency (RFID) tags, tattoos and even DNA samples are all identification strategies we employ to verify ownership of our animals.

The trouble is, I can’t read the RFID tag of an animal from 50 feet away; dangle tags fall out; and maybe I don’t want to wait six to nine weeks for the DNA lab to get back to me with test results.

As well, when you encounter errant cattle, they aren’t always in a real obliging mood, or you may be on horseback in a big field, or along a road allowance at a weird time of night. Those other identification methods, while useful in some circumstances, are not as quick and handy as reading a traditional brand. It’s a darn good feeling to spy a brand on a hip, rib or shoulder.

Having an experienced person apply a brand to clean, dry hide on a safely restrained calf, using a hot iron, can be done in 10 seconds or less. We give calves vaccinations and parasite control at the same time and administer medicine to help manage their pain. (At the end of the day, the human branding crew usually passes around a bottle of Advil too.)

Going to a rope-and-drag branding is an event in itself. A branding brings together the helping hands of friends and family. Big or small, everyone of all ages works side-by-side with a sense of purpose.

You can’t mistake the smells and sounds of a branding. And somehow, amid the ropes, sharp knives, needles, horses, humans, cattle, hot irons and roaring fire, there is a reassuring rhythm of controlled chaos.

When the job is done, you sit down together — as dirty and possibly sunburned as you’ve ever been — and eat the best meal you can imagine, while swapping a few stories and creating more.

You reminisce about when your kids were the young ones holding the “berry” pail, and today they are roping and wrestling and helping the next crew of ambitious kids. Horsemanship and roping skills are encouraged by a community greater than the sum of its parts.

For ranchers, a brand can be important for their identity, their heritage and their finances. It’s also one of the last permanent, physical, legal methods of staking your claim in a high-stakes industry.

When we load liners of cattle that represent our life’s work and investment, I want my brand on them.

Like all businesses, cattle producers have a lot of irons in the fire. We take pride in a reputation founded on quality, a handshake — and, in many cases, a brand. Literally.

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