Calving season successful for young farmer

Joe Sletmoen of Crozier is a young farmer who recently took on his first big year of calving on his own, which he said went “very well.”
“This is the first year that I’ve done a real big swing,” he noted.
Not only did Sletmoen end up with 40 calves (with six more yet to be born), he also works full-time on a farm north of Barwick where he calved 120 cows.
“But I’ve always helped with calving, so it’s not like it was the first year I’ve ever done it,” he said, adding last year he calved out 20 cows of his own and helped with another 30 he had just purchased.
Unfortunately, he did lose a couple of calves.
“That kind of goes with the territory,” he reasoned. “I had one calf born this year that was backwards, which I had to pull. It was kind of a tough night, but that calf is doing great.”
He also had a set of twins born about two weeks ago, which was a new experience for him.
“I didn’t know they were going to be twins,” Sletmoen remarked. “I came home and found them. She just finished having them when I got home from work and one was a little bit runtier, so I gave him a bottle morning and night for the first couple of days until he got strong.
“He’s doing well on his own now,” he added.
Sletmoen finished calving at work in early April, but had about three weeks’ overlap where he was calving both at work and at home.
“At work I was getting up every three hours all night. My cows at home, because they calved later and it was warmer, I didn’t have to check that often.
“So I was checking about every five hours.”
He was staying at work until mid-March—just coming home briefly in the evenings. “And my dad was checking on things at home,” he noted.
Sletmoen said he got used to getting up so often after a while.
“I didn’t hardly need the alarm anymore. But I noticed four sets of two hours does not equal an eight-hour night sleep,” he chuckled.
“You get pretty tired, but you get used to it,” he added. “And when it gets warmer, you have to check less often.”
Although a good season, Sletmoen already has decided he’ll make some changes next year.
“Next year I’m going to move my calving season back more so I don’t have the overlap,” he remarked. “Next year I won’t start calving at home until about the middle of April and it will go to the first week in June.”
Even though he’s still learning as each day passes, Sletmoen continues to enjoy his chosen career path.
“I love what I’m doing—it’s great,” he enthused. “People think I’m nuts to go work a full day and then come home and have to put in several hours more.
“It never really gives me a full day off, but it’s a great way to spend the day.”
But like any job, there are parts Sletmoen enjoys more than others.
“Some days it feels like I’m working all the time, it depends on what I’m doing that day,” he explained. “I really like working with the animals. On days when I’m doing stuff with the cattle, it doesn’t seem that long.
“But on the days I’m sitting in the tractor for 10 hours a day, that seems really long.”
Sletmoen also is continuing to get involved in the local agriculture community.
“I’m very interested in how this abattoir process is going to keep going,” he said. “I’m definitely for it and already have my membership.”
He thinks there’s a really good group of people heading up the project and he knows it will make a big difference if it goes ahead.
For instance, in April he sent one cow to the abattoir in Dryden and got it ground into hamburger when it got back.
“It took me less than a month to sell a whole cow-worth of hamburger,” Sletmoen stressed. “If we had an abattoir close, that would make it easier to do that.
“I could make twice as much money selling it as hamburger than if I just shipped it to Winnipeg.”
While some cattle still would be shipped west with a district abattoir, Sletmoen noted even selling 10 percent locally could double his profits.
But he conceded he needs to slow down how fast his farm is expanding.
“When I came home from school two years ago, I had two cows and now I have roughly 60,” he remarked. “I need to slow down and fine-tune what I’m doing a little more.”
Sletmoen stressed he couldn’t have gotten where he is today without the support from his family, especially his father, and his neighbours.
For example, when he bought cows from a neighbour, he was able to keep them where they were so he didn’t have to combine the herds. The same neighbour also would check on the cows during the day to help to out while he was at work.
“Little things like that have really made a huge difference to me,” Sletmoen noted.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, if you don’t have the help, you’re not going to be able to do it,” he reasoned. “There’s too much to do by yourself.”