Night Fire Ranch

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Canada
Dixonville, AB
Night Fire Ranch

Our farm is located in Northwestern Alberta, Canada. We run an angus cross cattle herd and some other fun animals.

Few quarter horses, Clydesdales, miniature Herefords, chickens, ducks and whatever else Aarin finds at the auction or on kijiji. Raising livestock in Alberta's Northern Peace Country. Mini cows & Mini horses, Red Angus cross cattle, Saddle horses & the Clydesdale's.

07/15/2025

Shadow and Friends are visiting Dr Tara at The Mighty Peace Vet Clinic for a Summer Camp tour!

03/18/2025

The new custom printed ear tags came in today. Kinda happy to not be engraving all of them this year!

03/08/2025

Bull sale season is upon us. We need 2 for the full size herd this year. We kept our red angus heifer bull but both of the older herds are getting new bulls this summer. So the bull breeder lists and sale catalogs are gathered and sale dates marked on the calendar.

The farm’s chief financial officer is still a little laid up from surgery so we did our very first online bull sale in bed. I was able to check out the bulls in person yesterday so it wasn’t totally relying on videos and pictures. It was very nice to do the final step of bidding together in comfort.

We had a lot of runner up bids before winning one nice Charolais bull. Would have liked to get a Simmental as well from the same farm but it seems we were always the second bid on every one we had our eye on. Oh well, just means we get to do another sale for #2.

03/03/2025

Vaccination weekend. All the bred cows and heifers were put through the handling facility and vaccinated with the scours vaccine prior to calving. This generally kicks off the preparation time for the calving season around here. Afterwards the cow herd was moved into their spring calving pen and we’ll begin building up the bedding in there. Already looking like spring around here with most of the snow already milted away and the water running. Prior years doing the vaccinations we’ve had to shovel feet of snow away from the gates and alleyways. This year we had mud in some spots. Nice not to have to shovel everything out this year. Gotta remember though that we’re just barely out of February and winter still has a ways to go.

02/09/2025

Just about over the hump of winter feeding as we move into February. Full weekends pushed filling the feed bin to this weekend. Unfortunately the John Deere decided it was too cold out or something and tripped a sensor on the PTO again so the Farmall (with less sensors) had to do double duty finishing making feed. Looks like it’s back to investigating what’s wrong with the PTO sensors on the John Deere.

The replacement heifers and bred heifers are up to full feed now getting around 280lbs of grain per day between the two pens. The fence line feeders have been a great addition for feeding the bred heifers. It would be great to have another pair of them for the smaller replacement heifers too, maybe next year’s project.

The hay stack for the cows is going down at a slower rate than last year. Seems the better quality bales we got this year and a milder overall winter so far this year has resulted in reduced consumption. So looking like we should have a healthy stockpile of bales this summer if the rest of the winter goes as it’s been so far.

01/12/2025

We’ve been about a year now with the remote cameras on the farm and they’ve definitely become a handy tool. I love being able to check on everyone first thing in the morning while sitting and having my coffee. We’re adding two more this year for a total of 7 cameras to better remotely monitor things. This spring the main calving pen will have two cameras to better monitor the whole pen during calving season plus one camera for every feed pen and barn stall.

But it got me to thinking what else I could monitor on the farm with my phone. I had such trouble last winter with water that I had just a cheap old camera watching the pressure gauge on the barn’s water pump. I thought I’d add a permanent camera for it this year but I thought shouldn’t there be something better to monitor something that takes power and produces water pressure? Something that would just send me data and alert me if something is out of the ordinary. After some searching I found a product for monitoring sump pumps called PumpFuse. After doing some reading I figured it should work the same for pressure pumps. After all, the calving cameras really are just security cameras and the parameters of monitoring a sump pump are about the same as monitoring a pressure pump. So I decided that since the cameras have been such a great addition, I’d try expanding this remote monitoring thing to other areas of the farm.

I’ve had it hooked up for 3 days now. It plugs in between the outlet and the pump and connects to the barn’s wifi that the cameras run on. The app shows in real time when the pump is running and it’s power draw. It also records that information and displays it on my phone. I have alerts set if the pump runs for too long, if it doesn’t kick in in a certain amount of time or if it loses power. This way I should know right away on my phone if the pump runs dry or if the waterer is frozen (not kicking in). Then I also have the ability to remotely turn the pump off by switching off the power on the app.

Plus watching the analysis of the statistics change over time I should be able to see if there’s an issue with the pump system itself (ie buildup of air in the line or plugging of the foot valve). I think this one is going to be a real game changer in the farm’s remote monitoring. It’s definitely got me thinking of what other critical systems I check on a lot that I could hook up to wifi and monitor on my phone 🤔. Or where it goes from here, automated drones for checking cattle on pasture, remote power control for feeding cattle automatically. With a little engineering there’s quite a bit these apps and farm-wide wifi can really do.

12/27/2024

The inline fence feed troughs are in place and the bred heifers are getting used to their new feeding routine.

12/23/2024

Last delivery of the year. Couple fat steers for the freezer from the mini herd.

12/16/2024

Finally got the open cows from preg checking sold. Made the trip down to the buying station in LaGlace. Haven’t been there since L.I.S days. Good to go catch up and see the changes. Plus get an actual cheque which means a stop by the bank on the way home.

12/09/2024

Corral renovations continue. We decided to fix a longtime safety issue by replacing the in-pen feed troughs in the bred heifer’s pen with fenceline feeders so we can feed them from outside the pen.

There’s been a couple times over the years they’d get to pushing each other for position at the feed trough and end up pushing me face first into it. Definitely one job I worry about getting anyone else to do for me. So hopefully this is one step closer to maybe getting away from the farm for a bit in the winter.

Address

1
Dixonville, AB

Website

http://nightfireranch.webs.com/index.htm

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