A Good Day's Work (25 page)

Don't expect her to complain, either, about the summer days, which also start before light, since it's the easiest time to check the cattle and the mosquitoes aren't buzzing yet. To hear her tell it, no better time can be had on this earth than when dozens of family members descend on the ranch for the annual ritual of branding the calves in June. Things get easier in the fall, when they get the hay in, fix the corrals, vaccinate the calves and wean them from their mothers. The rest of the time is spent preparing for winter, during which she says the cows “pretty much take care of themselves”—a statement that I discover is not quite true.

It is, by Alberta standards, a balmy minus two farren-heit by the time we set out. Normally Marj would have her rifle propped up in the passenger seat. Since I'm there, we're unarmed as we take a right past the grey mailbox that just says “R.R. 1 Hanna, Alberta.” We pass her two saddle horses—Yikes, who is reddish, Vegas, mostly black, and a donkey that goes by Jenny inside a fence close to the road. Marj hangs a left and stops. In a greenish canvas jacket, yellow work gloves and pull-on rain boots, she gets out to open the gate.

This is the “West Place” ranch, since expanded from the original Jager land, where she, daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven run three hundred pairs of cows and calves year-round. To keep predators out and the cattle in, their three ranches have sixty-nine miles of three- or five-strand barbed wire fencing, strung between wooden posts sunk sixteen feet apart. At sixty-nine cents a foot, that's one of their biggest costs. So part of every day is spent splicing damaged fence or, when it's beyond repair, rebuilding the entire section.

A dozen or so scattered heifers and calves give us the eye. And well they should: in time the good-quality ones, along with young yearling bulls, will be sold to other ranchers for breeding. Steers (castrated bulls) and older heifers go to feed-lots to be fattened for slaughter. It's a Darwinian world on a cattle ranch; producers need to get rid of animals that lower the genetic quality of the herd. So Marj is always examining the cow-calf pairs to see which ones are doing well and which ones aren't. “That time pays off when it is culling time,” she explains. Each year around 10 percent of her breeding herd is sold at an auction.

As we walk around, Marj tells me that she's looking for other things too. “You've got to know, are they satisfied?” she says. “Are they wandering too much? If they're wandering too much, they're looking for something. They need minerals. They need salt. They need grass. Maybe the water is dirty.” She fiddles with a siphon, capable of moving eleven to twelve gallons of water from a coulee to a water trough every thirty seconds when wide open. Then she scrambles down an incline, shovel in hand. She keeps talking as she chops a water hole in the ice for the cattle. Marj has got a bad back and on days like
today feels the chill in her bones, several of which have been broken in on-the-job mishaps. But ranches die without water.

They also need grass. It takes two years for a calf to reach full size, which is 1,200 to 1,400 pounds for a cow and a little less for a bull. Cows, as we know, have a fairly narrow range of activities. They sleep, they stare, they move their bowels, they wander slowly around. Occasionally, when scared, they take off with a little gallop. Mostly, in their own distinctive way, they eat. They swallow grass. The food comes back up into their mouths as cud, which they chew again. Because Marj's cattle spend most of the year out on the pasture, it takes thirty acres of grassland to raise a single head of cattle.

Back on dry land she uses her hand to ruffle snow off the ground cover. At the “Home Place,” a trio of creeks meet on a large flood plain that is naturally irrigated during spring runoff or during large rainfalls. The 2000–2009 period brought droughts, complete with associated grasshopper infestations, rivalling those seen by her grandparents. The past three years, though, were characterized by better-than-average rain and decent winter snowfalls. Consequently, her cattle have had lots of prairie wool, a hardy and nutritious native grass for grazing.

Some things have changed a lot since her grandparents first broke ground in this area, Marj says. Being able to “read the grass” is 100 percent the same. “You have to understand what time of year cattle prefer what kind of grass. Tame grass, the stuff reseeded by man, is typically at its best in the late spring and early summer,” she says. “You'd better be using that then if you've got some and then save your prairie grass for this time of year, because that's when it shines. It's great stuff to winter
cows on. They stay healthy. There's lots of minerals and lots of nutrients in it. It's just something you learn.”

WE'RE back in the truck, heading east, then north, then east again. From the looks of it we could turn southward and, except for the occasional cross fence, not hit a single thing until we reached Cessford, where the Nesters still farm. Shifting down and up, Marj tells me how her dad, Jack, stayed in school until grade eight, then began driving teams of horses and pitching bundles of hay like his brothers. His first trip to Calgary was to enlist in the Canadian army after receiving his conscription letter. He served in Britain and northwest Europe from February 1943 until he was discharged three years later. Then he came back to work the family farm.

On the way home he passed ghost towns, abandoned homesteads and shells of grain elevators. So many people just up and left from southeastern Alberta during the Dirty Thirites that the provincial government moved in to administer vast regions of the dry belt that no longer could sustain themselves. In 1938 three “special areas” were created to be administered by the provincially run Special Areas Board. Newcomers with the stomach for it could purchase twenty-year leases for abandoned lands. In the early 1950s, Jack acquired 2,560 acres on the Berry Creek, which was in Special Area 2.

“It was just a dot,” says Marj. “There was a grain elevator. A little country school where fourteen was the biggest class ever. I still remember being amazed at all the other school buses and kids on my first day of grade one. But you are who
you are and it was a great place to grow up.” When opportunity knocked, Jack added to the farm. Marj remembers her mom Lillian's big garden on the ranch homestead, the parade of family dogs and the saddle horses—Sandy, Dixie and Starr—which were the main mode of transportation for her and her brother.

There were only two other girls in the area. So Marj grew up rough and tough, doing what the boys did. “Chasing cattle, feeding cows, butchering beef, chickens and pigs, helping get the milk cow in so that Jack could milk her.” They fished in the creek beside their house. The kids taught her how to play fastball and hockey and to go tobogganing. “I would go and check cattle with Dad on horseback, always watching the wildlife, learning to respect the weather,” she says.

She finished high school and got a job for a while in an accounting office. (“I learned what I didn't want to be,” she says. “I was inside all of the time. I felt like a gopher.”) At nineteen she married Greg Veno, who grew up about forty miles northwest of the Nester place, but went to high school in Cessford. He and Marj met on the school bus. “We had similar backgrounds,” she recalls. “We both knew how to laugh and have a lot of fun while we worked or whatever we were doing. We were best friends before we were anything and remained best friends through thick and thin.”

For five years they managed a feedlot near Bassano. It was enlightening to be around the owner, Bud Stewart, who showed them how to feed cattle to butcher weight, how to deal with meat packers and how to hedge cattle stocks on the commodities market to protect against prices heading the wrong way. Marj calls what they learned a “university-class
education that no school could offer at the time.” But they were kids with dreams. They wanted to keep the family narrative moving forward. And then they heard about this land.

WHEN Greg died, Marj knew she couldn't keep raising cattle and growing wheat by herself. So she bought some grass and hayseed. That first spring her dad, nephew and brother-in-law helped her seed all the farmland to hay and grass for the cattle. The rain helped: twenty-one inches the first year and eighteen each for the next two years. Getting rid of the crops allowed her to trade in her combine for a new haybine, a baler and a baler-mower. She bought Angus bulls to crossbreed with the two hundred Limousin cows she already owned. Then she used the resulting crossbred heifer calves to build her herd up to three hundred cows. Marj called the result “cattle that work for me, not me for them.” For the next five years she and her daughter, Janet, worked the range, cutting and baling the hay and raising the cattle. “The days were long—daylight to dark,” says Marj. “But hard work kept me sane. Or at least, I thought I was.”

Her focus, besides keeping the farm afloat, was ensuring that Janet got to play sports and do the other things teenage kids got to do. That meant a major dose of empty nest syndrome when her daughter—often the only person Marj saw during the workweek—headed off to college in Lethbridge. Worried about becoming “some kind of kooky eccentric,” Marj found a young guy who wanted to learn, please excuse me, the ropes of cattle ranching. She put him on the payroll and gave his family and him a place to live. That took the
pressure off Janet to come home on weekends to help out. It also gave Marj the leeway to have a life. At a bull sale in 1995 she met Murray, a cattleman from Ontario who had taken to raising Angus beef in the Chauvin area of Alberta. “As time passed he became a permanent fixture” is how Marj sums up the courtship. They married in 1998.

Our feet make a bubble-wrap noise as we traverse East Place, where the ground is sandy and covered with lots of natural bush. The water table is uncommonly high for this country: the dugouts are spring fed; the water wells are about a hundred feet deep but never run dry. That allows Marj and Murray to raise 180 cow-calf pairs and a hundred yearling heifers for nine months of the year here. Marj knows what she can get for her cattle: $3,500 or $3,600 for a breeding bull, sixty to seventy cents per pound for a slaughter cow and $1,200 to $1,500 for a heifer. She also knows that profit margins are variable depending upon a whole range of factors: the world market for beef, how much supply is out there, the public perception of her product. In other words, they are price takers rather than makers, in economics-speak. So the easiest way to maximize profits is by keeping costs down and timing the market so that she sells on the price highs, not the lows.

Marj checks the gate—the start of deer season is days off—and considers the water holes. Then she looks northward, stands straight and says, “I think that's a bull moose.” Marj gets out her binoculars, scopes the animal a couple of hundred yards away. She says, “Oh yeah, that's a bull moose,” then hands the glasses to me. There turn out to be two of them. We trade the glasses back and forth, watching them grapple using their antlers for dominance. Marj tries to get their attention with a
moose call. We can't tell, from this distance, if they notice or not. But after a while they saunter off.

This isn't the sort of thing I see every day. For Marj, who likes the wild better than cities, it is. “You get to see nature from the perspective of how it really is,” she says of her life. “It isn't in a zoo or a book. It's out there. It's pretty easy to drive by at sixty miles an hour and not even see that stuff. Just slow down and take your time and you see that little three-point buck that was standing at the gate.”

At which point I ask myself—what little three-point buck? For that reason, I vow to try paying attention when we get back in the truck. Whether it's the focus or just coincidence, all of a sudden animal life is everywhere: an owl sitting on a big rock, a weird little bird that Marj tells me is a prairie chicken, a coyote that lives another day because Marj doesn't have her rifle with her today. The three ranches, she tells me, support mule deer, antelope and, during the last ten years or so, more moose and elk. Marj says the Hungarian partridge, which I gather is some kind of pheasant, finds good habitat to thrive there regardless of coyotes and foxes. Her land is also on the main migratory flight path of the Canada goose and millions of ducks, which like to drop in.