ACS News 

September 29, 2021

Hello Everyone, it has been a while since I have had the time to sit down and talk with all of you about what has gone on and going on in our lives.

This is going to be a little reading for you all but here goes.

As some of you would know, Ruth and I sold our place in Iowa and we bought a grass farm in Missouri that is about 1/2 hour from our kids.

With ground prices what they are in Iowa and us needing more grass we started looking a couple years ago and finally found a place that we thought would work for us.

It was an older farmstead that we bought that needed work but we got a few trees and the buildings taken down and burned and buried. We did a lot of new fencing and fence repair most of the spring and early summer but I believe we got it pretty well done to allow dividing the pastures up and fixing the boundary fence lines to keep cattle in and cattle out. We had to chuckle when one of our neighbors said he would guarantee us his bull would get out and get in with our cows as the former owner and him just did not fix the fence between them. We did, and no bull has gotten out to his surprise. Amazing what a little sweat equity can do.

The place does have a couple cattle waters, a large machine shed, a hay shed, a cattle working facility, and 3 nice ponds. That was important to us instead of just bare ground or a bunch of trees.

Got the worst case of poison ivy and poison oak you have ever seen doing all this. Fought that for 6 weeks. Finally gave in and went to the doctor to get over this. Ruth and I now are highly educated on this devil weed. LOL.

Here we are, 70 years old and moved down here to take it easy and I am not sure we have ever worked so hard getting things ready to take it easy. LOL again.

Ruth and I are homeless right now. We looked at building a home on the place we bought but were told it would be 2 years before that project could start. We decided to go the modular home route and set the home on a soon to be completed basement. These homes really are pretty nice and even though there is a wait on them too it is not 2 years. Looks like we will have ours set on our basement in mid January. We ordered it in mid May.

Our kids have a beautiful place and some ground where they live. We live in their basement, which is really nice, but they call us teenagers as they don't know where we are going or when we will be home. Pretty funny I think.

Because of the drought last year in Iowa we weaned calves early and moved some of the cows down here last August. They had hired some fencing done to let us do this to stop the high feed costs we were having to pay to keep our cattle fed. We did not have our place sold in Iowa nor did we have a place bought in Missouri so we thought we were going to have to haul them back and forth. Glad that all worked out and we did not have to do that.

Now we can move some of the cows and calves and all the open heifers and a bull to the kids place. We also finished up a couple weeks ago where some of the boundary fence was down or missing to let us turn cows into that part of their ground as well. Yay, more fencing!!!

In March of this year, a couple of months after we got the place bought, we moved the rest of the cows, open heifers, and bulls to three of the more secured fenced areas that were already here.

What came next is the most dreaded part of the move in my mind. We drafted our kids and other family members and started moving in the days they could help. Trailer load after trailer load of house hold items, and outside items, cattle equipment, tractors, a skid steer and on and on were moved. it took 10 packed trailer loads, and 3 semi trailers to accomplish this. Moving costs a lot!!!!!

It really is a beautiful place and area and that we look forward to enjoying life we are blessed to have.

Now about Advantage. Yes the site was down for a bit as we had quite a time finding a place that could host the site that would allow us to do what we do with it. The place in Omaha that hosted the site decided to no longer host any web sites and had Microsoft servers. That is what the Message Board was written for. The cost to re-write that part for the Linux server was too expensive for us plus handle all the data the old message board had. They also had to remove some of the pages and code specifically that work on Microsoft servers.

Not having the message board does take a lot of work out of the site for me as a lot of time was spent in keeping the site secure because of the open message board software even though we had it as secure as the software written allowed, hackers were always trying to access it.
 
There is no longer an Cattlemen ACS Program as it did not get used as much as it could have. We left it on the site for those who had paid to be in this program an additional year so people can search for them or they can share with others their contact information, we just do not have any words from them to go in our e-mail blasts. 

Not quite sure what to do with this as it does have a lot of potential to get your site seen. We will just have to think about this once we get a home in place and time to consider if it will be used or not.

The ACS Classifieds is still working well. Thank you to all who have continued to use it and the patience you gave it to get things up and running.

Well that's it for now,

Have a great rest of the week.

Brian Weaver
Advantage Cattle Services www.advantagecattle.com
E-mail twinoaks@fmctc.com