Rose Goldhahn

It sounds like you don't have a typical workday. How would you, then, describe a workday in the life of Rose Goldhahn?
I think it all depends on the time of year. Calving season – that takes precedence over everything else, and the weather also makes a difference. In the summertime or in the spring, usually we try to start out as early in the day as we can just because then you have more time to handle anything that gets thrown at you that's kind of a curveball.

Yeah. You touched a little bit on this sort of the financial constraints, the difficulty of ranching. Could you describe that some more?
A lot of it has to do because cattle being a commodity, like any commodity, it's subject to the whims of consumers, and also what the dollar is versus anything else. As the dollar gets stronger, our product price, our commodity price, tends to go down. So, I guess it all kind of evens out to kind of the same, it's just that you have more or less money. But right now, we're at a high point because there's so much drought in different parts of the country at different points in time. It hasn't all been all drought across the whole country, but the West has drought one year and then the Southeast and then the Southwest has drought. So, the cow numbers in the last six to eight years, nationwide, have really gone down. Apparently, we're at the lowest national cattle herd size in 75 years. But also, our efficiency has increased, right? So, we get more meat per animal than we did 75 years ago. But still our national numbers are down, so prices are higher, which is good for us, and hopefully it can help heal up some of the deficits of years past. Because about, I think it was 2022 into 2023, we ended up buying hay out of Minnesota to truck in here, just so we had something to feed our cows that winter. I don't know if we cut a hundred round bales of hay that year. It was really… I mean, for everybody, for everybody that we do haying for, there wasn't a lot. So that's one of those things that you can't plan for because you don't know when you're going to have a drought. So, hopefully we can help heal up from that. That was a pretty good size expense that year that you just kind of spread out, hopefully, over the paychecks year to year. And that's another thing. They say everybody lives paycheck to paycheck, which I would be inclined to agree, most people probably do. And we're no different. You get a paycheck once a year, and that paycheck has to last until next year. So, but no different than getting a paycheck every two weeks or every month or so. It's very volatile. You know, things like mad cow disease when it came out, that had a huge impact. They call her “the cow that stole Christmas” because that was right before Christmas in whatever year it was. It was a long time ago!