Rachel Gabel
Fall is a particularly busy time for farmers in the state. In the San Luis Valley, Coors barley harvest is followed by potato digging. You're welcome.
Corn silage harvest is just around the corner in my state. It's fast and furious, and mountains of chopped corn are piling up at a rapid clip. Whole stalks of corn are chopped right in the field and loaded onto trailers in what looks like giant diesel-powered salad shooters. From there, they're transported to feedlots or dairies where they're eventually fed. The stalks are chopped while they're still green and moist and mature enough to add nutritional value to the corn kernels. Huge tractors with blades on the front push the silage and pack it into piles. This packing process removes oxygen, stopping or slowing yeast production, which becomes a fermented product. It's then mixed with other feed ingredients like chopped hay, steam-flaked corn, dried distillers grains, and even bakery waste to provide a complete diet that's used to fatten cows to be slaughtered, or to nourish dairy cows. It's premium cow feed, and we produce mountains of it.
Fall is also the annual payday for many beef producers. The market was still pretty strong, but it seemed to dip a bit like a plane shot out of the sky after presidential candidate Kamala Harris vowed to forget the lessons of Nixon and put a price cap on food. I like capitalism better.
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Over the next few weeks, the calves will be weaned and ready to be sold or kept on the farm where producers will raise them until harvest. Some producers sell calves in pot loads (usually steers or heifers, sometimes a mix of steers and heifers) of 40 or more. Some producers use the purest form of price discovery by selling whole animals at local auctions. Cattle buyers representing feedlot operators are looking for specific herds to purchase and start raising. Sometimes called order buyers, they buy cattle with a specific vaccination protocol, genetics or management history, or that come from ranches that have cattle that have performed well on feed in the past. These herds usually head to a feedlot and start eating a diet rich in that cattle feed.
In the fall, many farm and ranch operations are completed, including weaning and shipping calves, harvesting crops, and preparing fields for winter. This is why suicide rates among farmers and ranchers appear to be higher during this time of year.
I wrote a column in 2022 titled “It's Not Just the Cows That Matter” and published it here. In the fall of 2022, we had an exceptionally dry year, grass was poor and input costs were high. Of course, if we had known the price increases were coming, it would have been even more difficult. Only breeding cows and heifers were kept, and that day I was by the fence watching several heifers, especially my favorites, being castrated and culled.
I wish then, and I wish now, I could describe autumn on the farm and ranch, the frenzy of the fall hunt, and the satisfaction of a job well done. All I could think of then, and to this day, was a man I knew who sorted paperwork, shipped cattle, and then shot himself. I still remember another man who took a call from his banker, drove home, and did the same thing.
The debate around mental health in rural areas remains intense, but this autumn I have been working on something concrete for almost a year now. Jason Santomaso, manager and auctioneer for Stirling Livestock Board, and I launched the ProAg Podcast almost a year ago, and we have been open on air about our own struggles with mental health and stress.
I knew we were reaching people when San Tomaso told me he'd been called to a man's ranch and heard him talk about his depression and anxiety and decided to get help. I knew we were reaching people when a man stopped me at the Colorado Agriculture Show and offered me a folded newspaper that I recognized as known as a “Hafer Column.” He read the newspaper by the mailbox in his pickup truck and as he handed it to me, he told me that after reading it, he chose to tell his wife about his despair rather than find his body in the store the next morning.
He folded the column along its worn creases and replaced it in his wallet. I have never felt the same way about votes cast with a wallet having any meaning.
Rachel Goebel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is the associate editor of Fence Post Magazine, the region's leading agricultural publication. Goebel is the daughter of the state's oil and gas industry and one of the state's 12,000 livestock farmers. She has also written a children's book that is used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.
