Round Up

40 Mile Grazing Co-op Annual Angus Round Up

By Bri Vos

October 29^th, 2017

Nestled in the crook of two rivers, the 40 Mile Grazing Co-op exists on 44 sections of windswept grassland. Bounded on the West by the Bow river, and on the South by the South Saskatchewan river, almost all of their land is native prairie.

The organization has been a co-op for about two decades but existed as an association long before then. Knowledge of this land runs deep through my family history. My grandfather held membership in it years ago and my dad has been a member since 1977.

I grew up on a mixed farm in Southern Alberta with a view of the Sweetgrass hills across the American border. The farm is small by Alberta standards, three dry land sections of mixed grain crops and a modest herd of mostly Simmental and Angus cattle.

My dad has farmed in this area his whole life. As did his father before him. And his father, my great grandfather, immigrated shortly after the turn of the last century and broke the land my family still farms.

My dad is an excellent grain farmer. He prioritizes care of the land over profit and in doing so, has curated healthy soil that can survive the hard weather that is part and parcel with this area of the world: harsh winters, blazing summers and the constant, prevailing wind.

But his real passion is cattle.

For forty years, my dad has brought his cattle out to the this grazing land in the spring where they live for roughly 5 months (depending on conditions), until he retrieves them in the fall. Once the calendar was turned to October in our house, there was always a countdown to the day the cattle came home: Round Up day.

While his love for cattle has never dimmed, after a few knee surgeries and a milestone birthday a few years back, my dad now talks more about sizing down his herd, or sometimes, on bitterly cold winter days after coming in from feeding them, talks about selling them all off completely. Hearing this, I decided it was important to capture my dad, in his element on round up day.

My dad did not pass his love of cattle onto me. Despite my regular exposure to cattle and 6 years of beef 4-H, I always tried to make myself less visible when my dad was looking for people to help at round up. Luckily I have 3 older sisters who were significantly more capable helpers than I was.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I followed my dad to the grazing co-op's, corrals early in the morning a few weeks ago.

Earlier in the week, the co-op's manager had brought in the cattle from their various grazing pastures to the sorting pens at the corrals. All of this gathering work is done with quiet stockmanship, on horseback, to keep the cattle calm.

All of the daily care for the animals, the land and the infrastructure is the responsibility of the contracted grazing manager, who deals with everything from maintaining the underground water system that brings water from the Bow river to 8 or 9 different pastures to treating cattle for rattlesnake bites

The 25 members of the co-op are only allowed to have a certain number of pairs (cows & calves) on the land during the season. This protects the fragility of the grazing land and makes sure there will be plenty of grass for the animals to feed on. This season, my dad was bringing home 46 pairs minus two calves that had been lost to natural predators or snake bites.

The actual workings of the round up relies heavily on a system of gates. First the cattle are herded in small groups through a rotating gate towards a chute. Then they're stopped one at a time at the front of the chute where the person running the gate will call out the tag number. Each member has a specifically designated tag number and so each animal is easily associated with the farm they belong to.

Once the number is called out, it's repeated down the line as the animal is let loose into an alley of pens. The person manning the pen for that number opens up their gate and the animal runs in.

While in theory all of this sounds perfectly simple, my childhood memories of round up mostly feature a thousand pound animal barreling down at me while I swear under my breath and will my shaking hands to open the gate before it passes by the pen.

I didn't man a gate this particular morning and maybe that's why I enjoyed myself so much more.

After all the cattle are in pens and before they are loaded on carriers heading back home, the manager comes around to do the count. Each pen needs to line up with the expected number of pairs headed back to their farm to ensure that no one has a stray animal with a wrong tag.

I hadn't seen some of the people who were at the round up that morning for years: a kid I had once babysat who now had a family and farm of his own, a high school acquaintance who was almost unrecognizable under a year's worth of beard growth, even my elementary school bus driver.

This community of cattlemen worked together seamlessly in near silence with the exception of a tag number called out and repeated almost rhythmically. They worked together with familiarity, with an obvious knowledge of each other, a deep understanding of cattle and of each other's animals.