There were two new permanent fixtures to be installed, one was the animal scales and the other was a squeeze chute. Scales help choose the animals for slaughter, replacement heifers to the breeding herd and weight gains of the young
There were two new permanent fixtures to be installed, one was the animal scales and the other was a squeeze chute.
Scales help choose the animals for slaughter, replacement heifers to the breeding herd and weight gains of the young bulls. During the ’50s there was a man from the Mainland who brought bulls to Hawai‘i by ship. Kaua‘i was lucky because it was the first island after O‘ahu that the ship docked.
On his first trip here he had a bull that we got for about $1,200 and got “thousands” of dollars worth by improving our herd. Right off the bat, we looked over our breeding herd and chose 25 pipi we thought were our best and put him with them.
The offspring bulls when mated with our first-time heifers created some problems. The calves were so big that we lost a couple of heifers and their calves. This bull had horns so we hadn’t solved the dehorning problem. Although in later shipments, we wanted Polled Hereford bulls because we got better than 60 percent polled calves when a horned pipi was bred with a Polled bull.
Life should have gotten easier but the fences were getting tired so that there was plenty for the paniolo to do.
One day when we had the replacement heifers in the corral for the final cut, I set the scales at what I thought should be the minimum weight. If an animal lifted the scale bar, it went into the keep corral, if not, the fattening pen.
My grandfather came out to watch us. When he got out of his car and came over I explained to him what I was doing. He spotted a heifer in the fattening pen that was quite a bit taller than the rest and he wanted to know why she was being culled and I explained that she didn’t raise the bar so she was cut.
He watched for a while and then left us to do our work. When we were all done he came back and looked over the herd we were keeping and agreed that maybe I knew what I was doing. We used the scales also for choosing the steers we would be slaughtering that week and also for picking out the next 20 or so for a little extra ground corn.
The squeeze chute was another work made easier for the care of the pipi. We first used it for branding any calves we might have missed in the regular brand but we soon branded all of our calves with it because of the liability involved in the old way of handling the calves.
The squeeze was also used in treating those animals with the beginning of eye cancer. Herefords are beautiful animals but they have no pigment in their eyelids, so they’re very susceptible to cancer eye. Every year we would check the pipi and treat any that we could save.
Another use for the squeeze chute was for pregnancy checking. I got Dr. Rex Glaysier, our veterinarian, to teach me how to do the checking so that I could do what we wanted of the test.
We were running a business and we didn’t want to carry over for another year and herd breeders so at the end of the breeding year any non-pregnant animals were sent out to slaughter rather than eat grass for another year. We always started with more animals than we needed, so giving one animal up was no sacrifice.
In 1960 Nancy and I with the paniolo hosted over 85 ranchers from the Mainland to a “Poi Luncheon.” After lunch I had to give a talk about our program which was well received.
Oh, by the way, we did not serve poi but boiled “kalo” and butter which the group really went for. The lomi salmon was a little bit salty but the Kaua‘i Inn loved it because they had to put another bartender on to take care of the thirsty ranchers.
We found out that in two years the Western Livestock Journal was putting together a trip to New Zealand and Australia like the one here in Hawai‘i. Nancy wanted to go so I asked my grandfather if I could go and he gave me his blessing.
We had to borrow from our kids’ savings accounts but we paid them all off before they needed the money for school. Nancy said, “Let’s go because we will never have the chance of being the first and everybody down there will be so open hearted.” We added a week to Tahiti on our way back home. It was a trip of a lifetime and with Tahiti as a kicker. In Tahiti we had a distant cousin Clare Levy who showed us around.
