34 Story Idea? Email Paul.Nolan@Farms.com Better Farming | November/December 2023 What is your favourite thing about being a farmer? For me, it is being on the landscape with the cattle, riding on the ranch, and controlling your own day. You don’t know how everything is going to go that day, but you take it all in and try to do the best you can. As long as you mostly get the job done, you get to make your own decisions all day and get to be outside. How do you balance farming and industry work? It’s tricky. I’m not going to say I make every meeting, but I do my best to make most of them. Zoom has changed everything. Not everyone loves it, but it’s changed meetings for me. If it’s a busy time on the farm and I’m in a tractor all day with service, I can still be quite involved in the meeting. It also probably wouldn’t be possible without my dad still around to cover while I’m away, as well as everyone else in the family and my fiancée, who pick up the work while I’m gone. What has your biggest challenge been in farming? I would say growing. I know I’m very fortunate to be on a family ranch and have that option, but we run separately between my dad and myself. Growing my own operation is a challenge, with the cost of everything. It’s tough to grow when bills come. It’s tough to grow the cattle herd when you have to sell extra heifers to make payments. What is a goal you have for your herd? As a whole, I think my goal would be to make very few or no more feed purchases. I would almost like to have more grain land so I would never run into the issue of having to buy feed. The goal would be to never have to worry about feed for our herd in the wintertime. But this might just be because of all the time I’m spending in the swather. How do you manage teamwork on the farm? We still do everything together on the ranch. My cattle run with my dad’s, and through tagging and branding we ID whose are whose. Like a typical family place, some people get their feelings hurt sometimes and some people don’t, but everyone comes back the next day and understands that everyone else is just Cattle graze in the pastures at Anderson's ranch. Anderson Family photo UP CLOSE
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