GPS is a common acronym.  It stands for Global Positioning Satellite.  We use it in everyday life–your smartphone has GPS, vehicle navigation such as OnStar utilizes GPS and all of the autosteer guidance systems in tractors and combines work using GPS.  

     There are 40ish yearling heifers across the road from the house.  Dad makes sure that they always have high quality hay, lush native grass as well as graze off wheat pasture.  They are well cared for and lack for nothing.  And they look like it.  Good looking set.  Now, for some reason, one of these bovine females has decided that she needed to jump the fence to get into one of Duke’s garden patches.  With the ground being extremely wet as well as it being a cultivated garden spot, the Earth is basically mud.  So the tracks are obvious.  You can see where she jumped in, made a lap and went back over at the same spot.  She didn’t eat anything.  But she didn’t need to.

      I have never seen GPS technology attached to an animal, but I am real sure that at least one heifer has GPS guidance capabilities.  And it is as if this heifer was using a GPS program to follow one row of onions, then made a 90 degree turn to the right and followed a row of peas then another 90 down a row of corn another 90 to the right and exactly followed a curving row of cucumbers.  I had never thought about using a calf as a cultivator, but it is a very effective tool.  The hoof action works to land, dig and pull the plant.  I can almost imagine the young cucumber sliding in between the cloven hoof as it is being pulled and slung out of the ground.  We’ll see how the peas and cucumbers fare as some of the casualties have been re-planted.  

     I didn’t use GPS to travel around OK on Memorial Day.  I kind of knew how to get to these farms.  I got to look at Pfeiffer’s online set of wethers.  Good set and they sold REAL well.  I thought 5 or 6 would sell real well, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting a $15,000 wether.  Shows what I know.  I made several more stops and made it home, just in time to do chores.  

     I do have a Polock story for you–sort of.  I had to stop and laugh at myself as I was trying to catch a set of wethers here at the house.  About the second lap around this pen, I stopped and thought to myself, “How do you keep a German/Irishman from catching a goat?  Put the goats in a round pen.”  

     Here’s the deal.  I brought home a set of wethers last week.  With all of the recent rains, I didn’t have any empty pens.  But I did have an empty grainary, so I cleaned it out, spread wood chips, installed a gate in the doorway and then dumped the wethers in the new pen.  I didn’t give much thought about catching them.  Until I was chasing them in a circle, with no corners in which to corner them.   

      Have a good day and a better tomorrow.