In my blog about Papa Karl you will learn some of how it came to be that we have the largest herd of Jersey cattle in the State of Wyoming (at least I believe this to still be the case).  As Paul Harvey use to say, here's, "the rest of the story".

When my late husband Jon went back to WI and purchased half a herd of Jersey dairy cattle from Papa Karl, he loaded them up, placed them on a semi and shipped them to me the third week of March and then stayed in WI for another week.  As Papa Karl recalls he questioned Jon as to the soundness of such a choice and Jon responded,"she competent".

Well, I must tell you, I sure didn't feel competent at five that evening, when 35 head of cattle and 20 pigs showed up.  The driver, bless his soul, and I carried those twenty - 35 pound weaner pigs 150 feet off the truck and to their pen.  Now, that may not sound like much, but if you want to know what it's like, find the nearest kindergartner and try kidnapping them, kicking and squealing in your ear the whole way - for just the distance across the playground, and see how you or they like it.

Then there were the eleven heifers.  They were no problem.  Send them out to pasture and feed them some hay.  Easy peasy as my son likes to say.  But, then the fun really began.  I had fourteen hungry calves and 10 cows with full udders that hadn't been milked in 24 hours.  I turned them in together and thought that would be that.  Well it wasn't.  Those cows had never raised their own calves and those calves had never had a mama of their own.  Jon had put the calves on the cows while the cows were in their own milk barn with their heads in a stantion and no chance to go anywhere.  Now, in my corral, they weren't about to stand still and let those calves nurse and the calves weren't to sure if this was supper or just a good thrashing.  

I had borrowed a milking machine, from my High School Ag teacher (Duane Watkins) - whose kids had raised dairy animals for 4-H and FFA; I thought well, I'll just milk them out.  But, I couldn't get the machine to hold a vacuum and the cows wanted nothing to do with going into my stantion.  I learned that night a very important lesson about dairy cows.  They like routine.  They like everything to be the same every day; don't move anything or they will balk and get nervous.  When they're nervous, look out,  they won't let their milk down and they will poop - all over the place. They didn't know who I was and wanted nothing to do with me, and trust me, I'm good with animals!  By the end of my attempts, I had been pushed, shoved, kicked, peed and pooped on.  At ten that night, I gave up.  I just couldn't do any more.  Jon couldn't understand my difficulties - they had all been perfect angels at Karl's.  I told him that if I didn't start getting some empathy from him, he could just stay in Wisconsin.  A week later, when he did get back, he again wondered what all the fuss was about.  By then, I had them all mothered up and was milking once a day and things were running smooth.  Arrrg!

Karl Anderson, aka Papa Karl, was raised in Mineral Point, WI, just a few miles from the farm where my late husband Jon grew up.  Karl's best friend's sister was Jon's mom's best friend.  That's how close they were and yet they had never met.  

One day, in February of 2010, we got a call from Jon's mom.  She said a neighbor was having a farm auction and he was selling some Jersey dairy cows.  She knew I had been looking for an additional milk cow and thought we might be interested.  Jon was heading back to WI for a week, to spend time with his two boys during their spring break, so we decided he should go back a week early, to go to the auction.  There were (and still are) very few dairy cattle in Wyoming and even fewer Jerseys.  Jerseys tend to have a small frame and have a higher feed conversion ratio (basically they cost less to feed for what you get) than say a Holstein, so they make for a better family or house cow, as they're called when you just have one or two.

During my search for a cow I had run across many others who said they were looking also and couldn't find one.  I went to Nebraska for my first.  So, we went to the bank and obtained a loan, with the idea that we could buy a few heifers and bring them back, to sell to others who were looking.

When Jon got to the auction, the first to be sold were the young heifer calves. Based on the price they were selling for, Jon was afraid we wouldn't be able to afford the older heifers. So when the lactating older cows came up for sale, he started buying - they were selling for about a third to three fourths the expected price.  By the time he was done, he had purchased ten cows. The two year old heifers came through next, (the ones we wanted) at the same price, and Jon seemed to have developed a problem with his arm - he bought eleven of them. We ended up owning nearly half the herd.  Over the course of the following week, Jon got to know Papa Karl; milking the cows in his barn while waiting for the veterinary health papers to be secured. Jon knew I was not at all interested in milking ten cows twice a day, so he also purchased, from the neighboring dairies, fourteen little bull calves.  Then he loaded them all up on a semi along with twenty feeder pigs and sent them home to me.  But that's another tale!

Jon and Karl had many conversations about Jon's life in Wyoming, and how it compared with living in Wisconsin. As a retired farmer, Karl wondered if we might need any help, as he would like to see, "that part of the country". Over the next few months, we had several phone conversations with Karl, and continued to invite him to come out. However, Karl's friends and neighbors kept him busy during the growing season with fencing, planting, and harvesting. 

In November, when I went back to Wisconsin for Jon's memorial service, Karl came up to me and asked if I still needed help. I said I did, and just before Christmas, Karl joined us in Wyoming. He moved into "Grandma's house", and has been helping out ever since.  He's like a permanent WWOOFer.  

In 1972 my grandfather contacted his four sons and said he was no longer able to take care of the whole farm (now 728 acres) and that if one of them did not want to come back to take over he was going to start selling off parts of it.  My father, Keith was the eldest and we were currently living in Lander, WY - he and my mom decided to return to the farm to raise their three children.

My grandfather was a sheep man and my dad was not, so we transitioned in to a cow/calf beef operation and raised hay during the summer to winter our cattle.  I grew up working stock, irrigating, haying, and riding horses.  As is typical of teenagers, I was ready to get away from it all by the time I graduated and left the farm the day after.  The next few years were hard times to be a farmer and my father ended up selling the cattle and going back to log home construction in order to keep the land.  He irrigated, put up hay and winter pastured the land to others.  His goal always being the protection of the land above all else.

When my husband Randy and I  moved back to the farm, in January of 1997,  Grandma Merrill's  "little house" is the one we renovated and moved into.  My we returned to the area because we wanted to raise our family with grandparents close at hand. Extended family was very important to us.  My grandmother was getting older and was in need of assistance so that only made our locating here that much more important.

My father told us, “You can’t make a living farming on Owl Creek,” (raising beef cattle and putting up hay) and said we would have to have off farm income (when my father farmed, my mother Sally, was a registered intensive care nurse).  With a BS in Outdoor Recreation and Natural Resource Management, I worked for the Forest Service and we owned an entertainment business in Thermopolis, but I was pulled more and more back towards the organic farm lifestyle I had grown up with.  I went to conferences and permaculture training and studied all the “how-to” books I could get my hands on.  I bought a couple of Jersey milk cows, and some laying hens.  Randy and I split up and when I remarried, it was to a farmer from Wisconsin.   Jon moved here and we raised some free bum lambs to start a sheep flock; 4-H hogs for the kids started us into the pig business and we quadrupled the size of my grandmother’s garden; put up season extending high tunnels and we bought more milk cows. We sold our town business but Jon still had a job selling oil seed presses for his old boss in WI.   Then there was a big change in my life.  I lost Jon to a hunting accident.  I was left with a two year old son and Randy and I's six year old daughter and eleven year old son.  A few months after Jon's death, I was blessed with the assistance of Papa Karl.  Now with a significant sized Jersey dairy herd (especially for here in Wyoming), I started management- intensive grazing (MiG), added raising meat birds on pasture, and started a Farmers’ Market.  My father said, “Well, I didn’t know you were going to do all that!”  “All that,” is the way I've found to create a sustainable system in which to raise nutrient dense food to feed our sick, confused, malnourished, overweight population and bring back a state of health, and that’s become my passion!

My grandmother, Marjorie V. Camp, was born in Thermopolis, WY.  Her farther, William "Bill"Camp, came west from Arkansas as a young man to work on the Buffalo Bill Dam outside of Cody, WY and later homesteaded on Cottonwood Creek (just past the Legend Rock petroglyphs), thirty or so miles west of Thermopolis and one drainage north from our current location.  Her mother, Lois Mae Nightingale, came from Hutchinson, MN, over Birds Eye Pass and arrived in the area as a new school teacher for the Happy Hollow School on Cottonwood Creek.  They lived there for many years until Bill bought a herd of Holstein dairy cows which turned out to be infected with TB and they lost the farm. 

My grandfather, Fred V. Becker and his mother, came from his birth place of Wild Horse, CO, when he was in his teens, to the Curtis Ranch, thirty miles up Owl Creek, to stay with his sister and her husband, who were working for Curtis'.  My grandfather helped as a camp tender and sheep herder.

The two met while my grandmother was in High School and my grandfather was working for the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCCs). They lived in various places in Hot Springs County as well as a stint in MT.  My grandfather worked full time as a farmer/rancher,  as well as 14 years as a welder for Empire Oil in Hamilton Dome.

My grandparents, bought the first portion of what was to become, the Becker Family Stock Farm, from Arch & Irene Merrill around 1957.  As my grandmother use to tell it, everyone who wanted to buy the property wanted Mrs. Merrill's "little house", but she didn't want to leave it.  When my grandfather came asking, he told her, "...it's to small for us.  We'll build our own place and you can stay as long as you want."  So he was able to purchase the 150 acre property for $12,000.