Darrell Holden on Irrigation Practices

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I’m Brian Hale, sitting in for the late Howard Hale as we continue his legacy of speaking with cattlemen and women from around the globe. Gelbvieh Balancer cattle are well known throughout the beef industry for their maternal strengths and superior growth. Gelbvieh Balancer offer genetics that work for the commercial cattle business.

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Here’s co-host David Woodruff with our guest Darrell Holden. Doesn’t matter how good you can use that feed. If you don’t have water for them, that seems to be a limiting factor in my mind.

Well, and that’s the hard part. And then, like I say, terrain is such an issue. I mean, throughout the West, lots of places are using four-wheelers and motorcycles and stuff, that’s fine.

I’m never going to tell anybody what to not do or what to do with their own place. I can run in a couple of canyons. I could run up on a four-wheeler and maybe check a trough, or I could run up and take my binoculars and glass.

But we have so many places where you just have to go on foot or a horse. And I’m not going to go a foot. Unless I’m hunting, I’m not going to be a foot.

So everything we do is with horses. And like I say, we’ll take back horses and pack in. Each horse will have 200 pounds of salt, you know, four salt blocks.

And we’ll just keep dropping off two at a time until we’re out of salt. And we try to salt up these passes and places to pull those cattle up there. But it’s steep country.

There’s a lot of shale, mahogany, oak brush. We don’t have a lot of quakes and pines because we’re just not that high. The top of the mountain’s about 9,200 feet.

It’s high desert. And again, we get 11 total inches. That’s everything.

If you meld all the snow that falls, plus the rain that falls, we get 11 total inches of moisture. And to put that in perspective for folks, a friend of mine in Arkansas this week got nine inches of rain in four days. In Desert Rancher, Daryl Holden with our co-host David Woodruff.

That’s it for the Cattleman’s Corner. Thanks again for listening and may God bless. I’m Brian Hale.