bird dog":3k2x7tkd said:
Looks like a highway department crew. Five of them working, Ten of them watching. I am all for tradition but I think I will stick with my squeeze chute.
i doubt (just call it a hunch) these guys brand very big sets of cattle, but if they did, it takes a big ground crew to keep things rolling. a GOOD crew roping and going to the fire is just as fast as a good outfit running a chute and will absolutely smoke most operations I've seen running a chute if they tried to handle a volume like many of the big outfits do day in day out. we brand a little over 6,000 calves between our fall and spring calving operations (2 separate locations) annually and head and heel every one of them. ropers and ground crew rotate. 5 guys up, 10 guys down. we do around 250 calves each day (brand 2-3x per week to allow for other things to get done and country to get gathered) and outside of very rare breakdowns, have cattle gathered to the pens and rolling by 8 and have them all done in time to have lunch well before 1. some of the guys on the ground at times don't look like they are doing a whole lot as it is well orchestrated, allowing time to fill syringes, mix meds, sharpen knives etc. say 5 younger guys knocking calves down and switching ropes to front feet, a guy branding, a guy giving shots, 2 guys cutting and earmarking and one guy running the eartagger, dehorner if needed and wound spray. the 5 ropers, two sets have a calf each stretched out at the fire and the 5th man has a calf headed and ready for when the first pair is done and lets their calf up. now, the glaring problem in most settings i recognize is labor, we are not the norm in that we have a 6 man cowboy crew full-time and hire the balance to work steady for the "works".if a young guy wants to work a season, they'd better be truly handy when they show up, not "rope at a jackpot one friday night a month and showed a 4H steer" handy or they will work exactly one day. we are blessed to operate in areas with very strong ranching roots and it seems that guys who are pretty capable are always in supply with a few phone calls. i know full well that is not the case in many locales. to be fair though, we brand a few more calves than a lot of places around and when i go to a neighbors branding and they brand 60 calves or whatever it may be, the crew could be much smaller but it often isn't, and it looks a lot like the video. i think in that setting while they are achieving a task that needs to be done, it is not another day grinding it out like it is for us but frankly a big part of why they got some cows to start with. they enjoy getting to host their neighbors and friends and being proud of their program but not having enough cattle to brand multiple times each year invite more than necessary to their one branding so to not leave good neighbors/friends feeling slighted, show their homegrown calves off to all their friends, put on a big bbq, etc., etc. nonetheless, labor or lack thereof is the best argument for the chute when branding calves and i can't disagree with it, if you need to brand 20 calves, getting 1 guy and running through a chute I'm sure is less of a production then running down 4-5 guys and stretching them all out.
