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November 28, 2006

Time of Reckoning

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Fall is a time of reckoning. It is a time to reap the rewards of a years worth of work and husbandry. Shipping time is a busy time of sorting and classing up the yearlings into uniform groups for sale delivery. Running test lots through the scale house to see if the estimated sale weights set in June were accurate. Fall is a time to reckon the books, cattle sale tallies with expenses; that old cash-flow situation.

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With the first skiff of snow there comes an economic and mental reckoning with the standing and stored feed that is on hand to get the cow herd through the winter. Sometimes that agonizing reckoning comes about mid-April on a cold, dry, windy day when all you can find is the beginnings of green on the south slopes.

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Fall is like middle age, you can continue to kid yourself or you can accept what is, make decisions to change what you can, and plan for next year.

The opinions expressed in the Western Folklife Center's Deep West online journals are those of the online journal participants and not the Western Folklife Center. The Western Folklife Center does not moderate these journals and as such does not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided in the journals or in any hyperlink appearing within them.

About Robin Boies

Robin Boies
Robin Boies is the product of a northern Texas cattleman and a city-bred girl from Boulder, Colorado. As a child Boies remembers Sunday's marked by church school and the weekly sermon, followed by an afternoon of Pitch or Twenty-one with red, white, and blue poker chips stacked neatly in front of her. When it came to culture it was sublime opera in the house and Hank Williams in the green Chevy pick-up truck. Boies found herself in Steptoe Valley north of Ely, Nevada, at age seventeen. For the past 28 years Boies has lived 45 miles north of Wells, Nevada, at the Vineyard Unit of Boies Ranches with her husband Steve. There they raised three children, Teema, Nathan, and Samuel. Teema enters Gonzaga University this fall to pursue a graduate degree. Nathan is back in college when not at the ranch after a service engagement in the 101st Airborne, and Samuel graduated from high school last year and has been in New Zealand since September 2005. While tending to the needs of the ranch Boise works to understand and tell the stories of contemporary ranching culture through writing and videography.

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