It's All Trew: Cow feed, from slab to sack

Today as I pass by the towering feed bins on ranches and observe the automatic feeders in ranch pickups, I shake my head remembering the good old days. Like all progress, the evolution of ranch livestock feeding has changed greatly, and for the better. Our former ranch owner, Charlie McMurtry, great uncle of Larry McMurtry of "Lonesome Dove" fame, told of his earliest efforts at winter-feeding range cattle. It seems the cotton gins of the area were seeking more profit from processing cotton and began compressing cotton seed and gin trash retracted from the cotton into slabs with the seed oil tying it all together like glue. The slabs came out from rollers like sheets of plywood about two inches in thickness. Gin employees broke the hot slabs into large chunks and stacked them on edge in boxcars for shipment. When a rancher purchased a carload of slabs he unloaded them into his wagons and hauled them to his cake house all the while standing the slabs on edge. In order to feed the cattle, ranch employees reloaded their wagons, making sure they had axes and hatchets along to break up the slabs into smaller pieces to distribute the feed more evenly among the cows. McMurtry would laugh and tell how on the feed grounds, each cow would pick up the biggest chunk of feed she could carry in her mouth, run off to the plum bushes and gnaw around the edges maybe all day until the piece was finally devoured, just like a coyote with a bone...more