Ranch aims for community involvement, teaching

CHAMBERS, Ariz.

Established with Navajo-Hopi relocation funds in 2009, the goal of the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch was to give a firsthand experience to anyone who shows up and in 2022 that remains true.

Early Saturday morning, volunteers and ranchers who have worked at Padres Mesa for more than a decade gathered at the ranch here as they prepared their horses for the work to come. It was branding day.

The day would consist of separating the 84 spring calves from their mothers and rounding them up in a corral where ranchers roped the calves by their legs.

While tied up, other ranchers immediately held down the calf to brand, vaccinate, tag their ears and castrate the bulls.

Following Arizona law, cow boss Gene Shepherd said branding is a must when it comes to livestock.

He also said the vaccine given, Blackleg, is to protect calves from a bacterium that is found in the soil. The calves are especially vulnerable to this bacterium when they are being weaned from their mothers and transition to eating forage.

The ear tagging gives each calf an individual number which helps in knowing the details about each one up until the processing stage.

Shepherd said these are all the basics that all ranchers should know about.

“It’s not just us, it’s everybody,” he said. “Everybody should know this, it’s just basics.”

All the calves who have been branded, vaccinated, tagged and castrated will be sold at once, Shepherd said. The calves will be loaded up in a truck and sold as a herd rather than separately.

“We have a herd of 95 calves that are ready to sell,” he said. “I think we’re going to sell them next month, sometime in July.”

During this process, the calves are gathered and weighed then finally shipped off.

Shepherd said right now, the ranch only has one cattle buyer, Billy Hall.

“He’s the only one we sell to every year, it’s been like that since we started the Native American beef program,” he said.

“He takes them out to either Oklahoma or Colorado to his pasture,” he said. “He just lets them go over there in the pasture and then maybe like several months, he puts them in a feed yard.”

Once the cows are in the feed yard, they are fed until they are “fattened up.” Once they reach about 1,300 pounds, the cows are ready for processing.

Shepherd said it takes about a year from ship off for the cows to reach this stage.

The processing plant is in Brush, Colorado, and once they are processed, they are taken to Albuquerque where there is a cutting lab. From there, restaurants and grocery stores order what they need.

The beef from Native American ranches is in high demand in the Albuquerque area and into Texas, Shepherd said.

“The majority of it (beef) stays in New Mexico and Texas,” he said. “They sell it here at the Navajo casinos and Basha’s here in Sanders sells it, Window Rock, and some restaurants like Hogan Restaurant in Tuba City, then the Thunderbird Lodge in Chinle.”

Shepherd encourages people who want to visit Padres Mesa and to participate in any work in which the ranch may need help.

“It was set up for people to come here and observe and learn hands-on about any aspect of ranching,” he said.

The ranch teaches people about specific ranching duties such as bull selection, breeding and forage monitoring.

“Whoever wants to is welcome to come and participate so people can learn and take back what they learned back to their operation and practice it,” Shepherd said.

Another branding will take place for the fall herd around New Year’s, he said.

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