Ranching by the Seat of Your Pants
“Just a lot of little steps and a really good fire inside of me.” That’s how Alec Oliver describes his return to ranching.
Oliver is the fifth generation to run the outfit in Oregon’s Bear Valley. The cow-calf and yearling outfit near Seneca, Ore., is a combination of deeded ground and adjacent Forest Service Allotment. On the ranch, cattle move by ankle express.
However, ankle express is no longer an option for Oliver.
July 14th, 2012. That’s the day he rolled his pickup and broke his back, leaving him paralyzed from the bottom of his sternum down.
After nearly two months in a hospital, his return to the ranch meant adjustments so he could transfer from a wheelchair to a modified pickup, side-by-side, tractor and anything else with wheels on it.
But getting horseback? He worked with a saddle maker to modify his saddle with a body support and less than 10 months after his accident, he was back on a horse.
But the lower half of his body is paralyzed. How do you cue a horse when your legs don’t work?
“It's all with your hand and verbal cues. And the horse just learns to be pretty sensitive and pretty reactionary to a little bit of movement,” he says.
To turn the front end, he’ll push his hand forward and turn it. To sidestep, he pulls his hand backward and to the side.
“To get them to move their hip over, it's more or less just twisting my hand and putting pressure on their neck to hold their neck still, then pressure against the base of their neck and almost the shoulder with the other rein,” he explains.
That way, he can open and close a gate. “Or if you're in a branding pen and you need to set yourself up for better shot, or sorting cattle and you need to change the angle so they move a little differently.”
Minerals Matter
Seneca, Ore., is coldest place in the country. Pastures dry out quickly and cattle are on hay for about five months when it’s not uncommon for temperatures to hit 20, 30, 40 below.
That means a good mineral program is essential. Oliver started his current program around eight years ago with his first-calf heifers. “It dries up early in the summer, so we’d put a little mineral out there just to help them with that dry feed,” he says.
The tubs did OK and the calves weaned fine. However, he was still skeptical, thinking it was just another input.
But he used the tubs in the fall and again in the spring prior to calving. “I’d put it out in front of our cows in that third trimester, just to try to get a little bit of fetal programming,” he says.
“The first year I had it in front of those cows the month before calving, the vigor of those calves was outstandingly better. They hit the ground, they had more life to them.”
In 2020, when they gathered off the forest, they put everything on the mineral tubs in late September and left them out all winter. “It gives those cows quite a bit of extra in the fall when they can be on some pretty low-quality feed and still maintain through the winter,” he says. “We held back 5 to 7 pounds of hay per head per day all winter long.”
The cows went into winter a little under-conditioned. The 2021 calving season saw cows at body condition scores of 5 and 6. “Just perfect, I’d say, with less hay and less feed input.”
Calving season started cold in 2021. “We were below zero every morning,” he says. It was one of those stories your grandpa tells—2 feet of snow and 10 below.
“We lost one or two calves to cold weather and otherwise, these calves had enough life in them that when they hit the ground, they’d get up get up and go,” he says. “And I think part of that has to do with being on a good mineral program. Before we were on it, we’d have a few sick calves. So as far as the Rio, I think it helped us out.”
His mineral program also paid off with his first-calf heifers. After the fall gather, preg-checking time showed the heifers with a 99% breed-up on large pastures with bulls, he says.
Ranching is tough. You’ve got to be willing to adjust your management and adapt as the world changes around you. Just ask Alec Oliver.
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