When I was a kid in the 80’s, we lived out in the sand-hills of Nebraska on one of the large ranches that make up that part of fly over country. This being the late 80’s, there was always news of the Evil Empire, the USSR, on the radio. I remember asking my dad if there were ranches in the USSR like the one we lived on. I don’t remember the answer.
Fast forward 25 years, to the summer of 2013 and I found myself in the former soviet republic of Kazakhstan building a ranch.
Abandoned village buildings
The ranch I was working at was a green field project. We had very limited infrastructure. There was no fence, no power, no roads, no barns, houses, or really anything except for a few old wells from the old days. There was an old village near the headquarters of the ranch that looked like it had been abandoned a century ago, but in fact it was only abandoned for 15 years when we moved in. It’s just that mud brick walls don’t last long once people move away!
The crew building some high quality corrals.
The crews for building the ranch mostly came from Uzbekistan, with the foremen being from the city of Almaty Kazakhstan. This is a pretty common arrangement for construction in Kazakhstan. There is more money in Kazakhstan and many workers from Uzbekistan migrate north in much to work in Russia and Kazakhstan ,mostly working in agriculture and construction. They were good workers who would do exactly what you wanted, but you had better tell them exactly what you wanted because that’s what you were gonna get!
One of the guys welding up some rebar on some posts. The welding outfits using just a cheap generator and cheap inverter welder is very common.
The other thing is that a construction crew usually showed up with absolutely zero tools. They would have the cloths on their backs and the sandals on their feet, and that’s it. Because of this, the ranch had to buy tools to do the construction. This is a big of a problem because it means that the managers don’t have a big incentive to get good tools because it’s just for one job. At the time there really wasn’t any such thing as a crew that did fencing or built corrals. It was just a general crew and you had to get everything for them.
We were so remote that we couldn’t get cement trucks, so we mixed it all up by hand.
Despite the challenges, we got a nice set of corrals built and even ordered in a fancy Silencer chute. It was all ready to go by the time the cows arrived and it worked pretty good. A lot of places in Kazakhstan do all this work with really poorly designed and even worse built facilities, so I’m really glad we got things to work good. We had a few challenges with concrete, electricity, and plumbing, but overall it turned out good.
the cows ride from Australia. Boeing 747-400 freighter can haul between 3 and 4 typical American cattle trucks.
The cows were coming from Australia. We got almost 3,000 heifers from down under. It was kind of a challenge because the requirements kept changing and we traveled all over to ranches buying these heifers. They were quarantined for a month in Australia then flown to Kazakhstan on Boeing 747 freight planes. I think they stopped in singapore or somewhere to refuel, so it was like two flights, each 8 hours long.
One of the biggest challenges with flying the cows is that the climate control on a fright plane is really working hard to keep up with almost 400 heifers! Usually it does, but pneumonia is a common problem after this kind of a flight, especially when you consider we were coming out of Australia and into Kazakhstan and the weather wasn’t always cooperating.
Using normal cargo trucks for shipping cattle is not ideal, but it’s very common! These are side dumping russian “Kamaz” trucks. They’re pretty rugged, easy to work on, and not really that smooth, for cows or driver!
After arriving in Almaty, the cows had to be loaded onto semi trucks. For this shipment the trucks weren’t all that great and the guy organizing the trucks would have had a hard time organizing a two car parade down main street in a one horse town. We had all kinds of delays with the trucks, and more than a couple real WTF moments as well!. But they ended up all getting to the ranch. most of them in one piece.
When they arrived at the ranch, the cows had to undergo a pretty extensive quarantine period. This involved having government vets come out and take blood, do some vaccinations, and try to make sure everything was good with the cows. There was (and is) a lot of issues with quality of vaccine, how vaccine is administered, how cows are worked, and how records are kept. Without going into too many details, I’d just say that it’s no wonder that they have so much problems with preventable diseases among the livestock in Kazakhstan and the only thing that really saves them is the sheer distance that separates most farms.
After a bit of arguing, and bit of fighting, and sometimes just doing things our way, we got all the cows thru the quarantine. Now we’re out of the woods…well, not so fast. When you pile together 3,000 heifers from a couple dozen ranches together you’re gonna have some issues. When you throw them all on a plane for a day and a bad truck for another day, then throw in different climate, questionable vet care, and really sketchy feed, you’re gonna have some problems! But I reckon that’s a story for another day.
In the end, we got the cows settled in and turned out to pasture about a month after they had arrived. Everything we had brought was heifers, so we didn’t have any calving to do that winter, so that saved us a lot of work, and it’s a good thing too because it was a tough enough winter with plenty of adventures to keep us busy as it was!
Exploring the new pasture, a couple weeks after arriving and just after getting out to pasture.
Some of the Australian Hereford heifers.
