Blak Jak Ranch

10/15/2024

Clear skies here at Blak Jak Ranch make for great photos of the night sky. This is a comet that has not been seen by man in 80,000 years. Photo taken by William, my daughter's beau.

09/11/2024

08/06/2024

Updated sale board. Only one left for this season. We will have cow/calf pairs and heifers available soon. They are currently 'visiting' with the big guys.

08/06/2024

It was another gorgeous day here at Blak Jak Ranch.

07/24/2024

This year has been full of surprises. When we have a calf born, I have this kit we grab that is prepacked. In it is the ear tags, some antibiotic, and a nutrition paste for the new born. It is particularly big and blue. We have to check them out, male or female?, and tag them to keep track of them, and record keeping.

The cows have now figured out when they see me, with John, AND that bag, that we are coming for that new calf. So the cows will run a little interference. The cows themselves are not aggressive, just big and blocking our access, with the new mom fretting the whole time.

Jade calved the other day. We went out in the morning, John got a hold of the baby (a new heifer) and we did our thing and left her with a lovely new bright yellow numbered tag. A couple hours later, we had some errands to run, and as we are driving out the driveway, we notice in the mesquite, a calf, all alone. Then out of my mouth pops there is no ear tag!

We turn around, and go back to the house to get the blue bag. So the question then became did Beryl or Jule calve? No. Not them. They are fine. So we decided to get a hold of the calf, to try and get the attention of the mom. The only cow that looked in our direction was Jade. Hmm. Twins.

She had the other one tucked away by the hay rack, so we needed to move the three into the barn pen. It took a bit of convincing, John grabbing newborns, me getting kicked in the jaw, him getting kicked all over with poo everywhere, while I drove the ranger with him struggling to hold the 70 pound babies, one at a time to the barn pen. We tucked the three away to a private suite, so the new mom could sort it all out and figure out how to deal with two. Thank goodness it was Jade. She is an experienced and doting mom who was just confused and does not know how to count.

The weird thing is that this was our second set of twins. We never had any twins before this.

Diamond, with her two boys are pictured here. They were born a few weeks earlier and are doing very well. They went out with the herd about a week after they were born.

07/22/2024

07/22/2024

It's been a while since I have posted. We are finally all settled in here. We are now ready to start selling our fabulous Wagyu Beef here in sunny Arizona. To that end, some photos.