June is a busy month. For most people with school-aged children, it’s the beginning of the mania that is summer break. This is the start of family reunion season, camping trips, vacations and all those other things people tend to do when the days are long and the nights are warm.
For ranchers, it’s the beginning of hay season in most places. School break just means your summer help is finally available and that you can get more out of those long hot days. Winter feeding is a mere memory now that your herd is out on pasture, but you’re keeping an eagle eye on the drought monitor and the local weatherman. Now, instead of frostbite and spring blizzards, you’ve got heat stress and forage levels to worry about.
To me, June is the most hopeful month of summer. If I had a magic eight ball, it would say “Outlook good” in June. The grass on the range and the side of the road is still green, not the increasingly crusty golden brown of July and August. The major high temps haven’t hit yet, and there’s still hope that drought, disease and pestilence won’t plague the crops or the cattle. There’s still time for the corn and calves to grow and you can still be optimistic about the harvest. Summer hasn’t gone on long enough for anything to get screwed up yet, so the possibilities are endless.
I feel like that optimism bleeds over into the plans we make for ourselves at the beginning of summer – like New Year’s resolutions 2.0. In June, there is still time. Time to take that trip, prep that steer for the county fair and get all of those “wait for summer” projects done. Then the cows get out, the heat kicks up, and those extracurricular plans get shoved to the side as you slowly shift into survival mode.
However, for the same reason that you can’t expect cows to calve in February when you don’t turn the bull in with them until August, you can’t expect yourself or your ranch to be as productive as possible during the summer when you don’t give yourself opportunities to recharge. There are plenty of adages and proverbs to back me up. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is a classic. A personal favorite is “To everything there is a season and a time under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 KJV)
I hope you make time to enjoy your summer, not just wring every hour of daylight out of it. Take any opportunity you can to replenish the optimism that thrives in early summer, and hang on for the ride. Your family will thank you, your cows will thank you, and you might thank yourself by the time August rolls around. After all, things aren’t screwed up yet.
