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It can be hard to tell from a picture. It took me a few pics. Some nice calves look plain with the wrong stance.

Here is a plain calf in poor condition to compound his plainness. Here are a couple nicer ones.

The calves look okay but I would call them plain. Plain calves sell hit and miss. Some sales are 10-20 behind good calves. Others can be much more. There just aren't always many buyers at that sale for them. Also stuff like weaned and shots can sometimes not matter if there aren't many buyers to...

With the breakup of land you have, you are probably best set up for steers. My understanding of western SD is you probably can't support 10 cows on 120 acres of grass. You could support a lot of steers if you want to with the hay ground helping, assuming it's irrigated.

@RDFF I'm sure it's mostly operator error on my end. I do have an AQ chute with a solid sheeted rear gate but alley is just heavy duty panels. I thought AQ was all about letting the cattle see the way forward. I guess they forgot about the cattle still in the alley.

Thanks for the bud box tips, @RDFF. Sometimes the lead animal doesn't want to go all the way up the alley, causing a pause to the flow and leaving a couple stragglers in the bud box. Any tips to get them to want to go all the way up?

Money is made on the buy. You can control the price you pay to buy. You can't quite control sell price.

Short weaned is the worst. Either straight off the cow or weaned at least 30 days or a lot of people won't bid around here.

I built what I call a receiving pen for 100 head of calves that can double as a feeding pen. I used wood posts and wire panels. If I were to do it again, I would do pipe posts with a top rail and high tensile woven wire.

Also, I don't think round is real necessary unless you are in a small pressure pen. I don't have experience with rounded pens though. Maybe I don't know what I don't know.

It sounds like you may have cattle stay in it overnight. If so, it's basically a feeding pen. The space requirements for those are 100-300 sf per animal depending on how arid your region is. If it's just for catching and sorting cattle, the space requirements are much less.

If you're able to put them with the rest of your cows and use the same bull for them, it would help a little. Potentially managing a cow group, a separate 2-3 year old heifer group, and a replacement heifer group is a lot. Especially for a herd of less than 10, like @rocfarm currently has. I...

Keeping your own replacements doesn't pencil for a small herd, or much else for a small herd.

You could give them a shot of lutalyse just to be sure.

Vets are always busy after a full moon

@BC Not sure. I have only used road rock for our existing driveway, which is basically 3/4 minus. I think it's about $15/ton.

Cost $0.10-$0.50 per sf depending on quality. I'd probably get something in the middle. It's good to hear most of you guys think it's valuable. I appreciate the comments.

I need to add on to our driveway to have more turn around space and equipment storage area. I am going to fence off from my pasture about a 200'x200' area that will connect to my existing driveway in front of my shed. What are recommendations as far as construction of the gravel driveway...

My local haulers seem to just have a minimum price. Per mile only seems to factor over maybe 50 miles or so. Just my speculation. I just pay the bill. I don't ask for a breakdown. The only time I used a 32 ft trailer was 2019 and he charged $175 for 35 miles.

What size trailer you have?