Burnt River Ranch

12/04/2025

We hate to think that winter will soon be here, with this nice weather we have been having, but it is the perfect opportunity to talk about keeping pigs during the winter!

Winters icy cold grip is enough to turn anyone off of keeping livestock through that season, but did you know it also has a ton of perks when it comes to pigs? Here’s a few great perks about keeping pigs during the winter season:

• Pigs are pretty resilient and durable animals. They produce a lot of body heat naturally and like to cuddle together, and with lots of bedding, they actually do really well during the colder months. There are some farms that don’t even have a shelter for them, but just provide them with a round straw bale to burrow into. We personally prefer to offer an actual shelter to our pigs, but even a makeshift 3 sided shelter made from pallets with ample straw would suffice.

• A pallet pen made from free pallets screwed together makes an awesome low-cost, easy to take down, and moveable pig pen for a few pigs that will have no trouble lasting you until their butcher date. Plus, pallets are cheap and easy to replace if needed.

• It’s much harder for pigs to root when the ground is frozen! This means less chance of escapees and less ground disturbance.

• Pigs are generally pretty clean animals when it comes to soiling their bedding and enclosure. Given the choice, they usually prefer not to pee/poop in their bed and will create one area in their pen dedicated to going “potty”. This means less cleaning out dirty bedding.

• Pigs don’t require hay in their diet, so no panicking trying to find hay like you have to for a lot of other livestock. Though they do like to eat some hay, it’s not a crucial part of their diet.

•We water our pigs once a day during the winter, and only give them the amount they will drink so it doesn’t freeze. Because it’s cold, we find they drink their fill and don’t play in it. Less wasted water, and less water to haul around as they aren’t mucking in it like they tend to do during the summer.

•In the spring/late winter when your freezers are running low, you can fill them back up with pork, & bonus, the processing facilities aren’t as busy!

12/02/2025

Decorative pillows?

Throw pillows?

All I can see is another thing that’s only purpose is to end up on my floor for me to trip over 50 times while trying to get stuff done.

Throw pillows only get thrown… in the trash.

Anyone else relate?

11/29/2025

Winning the Farm Family Award, was honestly something I dreamed of having our children or grandchildren win one day, when our farm has really established generational strength and expansion.

In my opinion, it is rare to have a first generation farm receive this Honor.
Usually, it goes to farm families that have farmed their expansive plot for many generations and many years, and have amassed a much larger amount of acres than we have. Thats why we found it such a surprise to learn we had won!?
Plus, I can’t even fit on my hands all the other farms I can think of that are just as deserving of such an award!

Though we both come from farming families, running an agriculturally based venture has skipped a generation or two, and we knew if this was something we wanted to pursue, we would have to start over.
We didn’t have a farm handed to us, to continue to grow and expand. That just wasnt in the cards. There was nothing to fix, because there was nothing here at all. Nothing to fall back on, or even get started with.
So, it was a lot of sacrificing.
A lot of learning.
A lot of researching.
A lot of hard labour and long hours.
A lot of going without and making do.
Maybe some questioning our sanity at times…

But what it did do, was make us stronger as a family, as parents, as a couple, as community members and as agriculture advocates. We have learned so many skills.

We’ve always been transparent about our journey; showing the ups and downs.
Most of all, we have really enjoyed getting to help others in this lifestyle as we go, as we have had the privilege of being mentors to others, and had lots of unique opportunities come our way.

Thank you to those who believed in us, encouraged us, celebrated with us, have been there for us during hard times, and helped us in any way to get to this point. Looking back on where we started, the farm has changed so much, as have we, but we are far from done building this crazy dream.

We are so incredibly honoured to have been recognized, even if how we have done things has been a bit unconventional. Thank you.

11/28/2025

If I look back on us 5 years ago, where we are now seemed lifetimes away.

Trust me, we have heard almost every sort of “tone it down” comment there is, but we don’t ever regret going with our gut and staying true to ourselves to get to where we are at now.

Keep going.

11/27/2025

That cream line though!

Gotta love my Jersey girl, Pixie ❤️

I love a lot of dairy breeds but there’s a special place in my heart for Jerseys, that’s for sure!

11/25/2025

My name is Jack Miller, and on Saturday at ten o’clock I’ll be standing in my own driveway watching my life get sold by the piece.

They call it an estate sale, but it feels more like a yard sale for a dead man who just hasn’t had the decency to lie down yet.

I’m seventy-four. My boots are cracked, my flannel is soft from a thousand washings, and the Nebraska wind still smells the same as it did when I was six years old riding on my daddy’s shoulders to check the cows.

This ground has had a Miller on it since 1924. My granddad turned the first sod with a team of mules. My dad kept it alive through the eighties when the bank tried to eat us. I thought I’d be the last one to leave it, but I figured I’d leave feet first in a pine box, not watching strangers load my combine onto a lowboy trailer headed for Kansas.

The sign at the road doesn’t say Miller Farm anymore. It says ABSOLUTE AUCTION – NO RESERVES – EVERYTHING GOES.

All week people have been poking around like crows in a cornfield. A woman in yoga pants held up Grandma’s butter churn and asked if it was “real” or “just for looks.” A guy with a man-bun tried to talk me down on the price of my hay rake because he only wanted the wheels to make a chandelier.

Yesterday a young couple stopped at the old wooden gate my dad built the year I was born. The paint’s mostly gone, but you can still read MILLER in faded green letters.

“Oh my gosh,” the wife said, snapping pictures. “This is perfect for our entryway. So rustic.”

Rustic.
That gate held back stampeding cattle the night lightning hit the barn. It’s got hoof marks and blood stains and a patch from the time I backed the pickup into it at sixteen. But sure, honey, hang it over your subway tile and call it rustic.

I stood there with my coffee getting cold and didn’t say a word.

It wasn’t one big thing that killed this place. It was a million little cuts.

The elevator started paying thirty cents less a bushel because “the world market.”
The seed corn went up forty dollars a bag because “research and development.”
The fertilizer plant shut down, so now it comes from Morocco and costs twice what it did in 2010.
The grocery store sells sweet corn flown in from Peru cheaper than I can grow it thirty miles away.

Two years ago I had the prettiest stand of corn you ever saw. Ears filled clear to the tip. I ran the numbers and it would cost me more to harvest it than I’d get paid. So I fired up the shredder and turned a hundred and sixty acres of gold back into dirt. Sat in the tractor cab and cried like a baby while the stalks fell.

My granddaughter Lily is sixteen. She helped me sticker everything with lot numbers last week. She stopped at the old John Deere and ran her hand across the seat worn smooth from three generations of Miller backsides.

“Why sell it, Papaw?”

“Nobody needs what it does anymore, darlin’. It’s made for growing food. The world don’t want food grown this way now. It wants food grown cheaper, farther away, by somebody else.”

She didn’t get it. How could she? She’s never seen a grocery store shelf empty. She thinks food just appears.

That’s the joke, really. Shelves are full, but the people who filled them are disappearing.

Saturday they’ll sell the tractor, the tools, the gate, the butter churn. They’ll sell the kitchen table where my wife and I paid bills and held hands and raised two kids. Some of it will end up in landfills. Some will end up as “farmhouse décor” in houses that have never smelled silage or heard a rooster.

I don’t hate the buyers. They’re just folks wanting a piece of something solid. I hate that the only piece they can still afford is the memory of it.

When the last item is gone and the auctioneer says “Sold,” I’ll still be standing here. The barn will be empty. The fields will already belong to an investment group in Omaha that’s never felt this soil between their fingers.

But the wind will still blow. The red-winged blackbirds will still call from the cattails. And somewhere under all this black dirt, my granddad’s sweat and my dad’s blood and my own broken heart will still be feeding next year’s crop—only it won’t be mine anymore.

If you ever bite into an apple and it tastes like sunshine, or pour milk on your kid’s cereal without a second thought, just remember: somebody loved you enough to get up before dawn for fifty years so you wouldn’t have to.

Most of us are almost gone now.

When the last small farm disappears, don’t be surprised if the food gets a little less sweet.

Because love was the secret ingredient, and nobody’s figured out how to import that yet.

11/24/2025

Yesterday was a nervewracking day, watching this big structure you’ve made just swinging in the air, with the potential to crash or take out the rest of the shop with one gust of wind or any structural failures.

For weeks we have been building the roof on the ground as we would never have been able to physically get it done building it conventionally. We’ve been prepping and planning for it to be strong enough to withstand the big lift onto the roof of the shop. And working around delays in the tin order, damaged tin and having to re-order, and weather constraints.
What a huge relief to have it set on top where it belongs, with no issues.
Thanks to Downtons Transport Ltd. for coming out to do the big lift, and of course all our other much appreciated help!

11/24/2025

As the sun sets over this farm tonight, the view outside looks just a little different.

Thanks to the crew who came to help us today;
and Eddie with Downtons Transport Ltd.; we got this 14000 lbs of roof finally set on the top of the shop where it belongs!

What a huge relief that things went smoothly!

Many prayers were said prior to and during the lift, not gonna lie.

11/23/2025

Nora is the reason we have a call ahead policy on our farm 😂🤪

11/22/2025

11/21/2025

Hello.
It is I.

Your local Jersey Cinnamon Roll — professional bottle drinker, straw bed tester, and tiny chaos generator — here with an urgent economic announcement.

I have recently learned that the milk my cow-mom works SO hard to make…is currently worth $13.43 for 100 pounds.

I’m only days old, shaped like a bakery item, and my hobbies include tripping over my own knees — but even I know that is offensively low.

Allow me to translate this crisis into human terms:

Trying to run a dairy on $13.43/cwt is like running a marathon…

uphill…
in a windstorm…
with no shoes…
carrying a full-grown Holstein on your back…
while someone keeps moving the finish line another eight miles down the road…
and the prize at the end is a half-used coupon to Blockbuster.

That is the dairy economy right now.

And here’s the kicker:

It costs $5–$6 a day just to feed ME.
ME.
A tiny cinnamon roll who weighs less than a sturdy bag of dog food.
I do not produce milk.
I do not contribute to the labor force.
My greatest skill is looking cute and causing light emotional distress.

Now imagine feeding a full-grown dairy cow.
Imagine feeding hundreds of them.

And then imagine getting a milk check that barely covers the hay bill, let alone labor, bedding, machinery, maintenance, minerals, water rights gymnastics, or the emotional damage caused by calves (not naming names) who escape under gates.

The math?
Not mathing.

And I’ve been observing the humans.
They’re tired.
They’re stressed.
They’re doing that deep exhale people do when they’re thinking about bills and pretending they’re fine.

But it’s not just the farms that feel it.

When dairies go down, so do:

• hay growers
• feed mills
• truck drivers
• welders
• hoof trimmers
• vets
• equipment dealers
• nutritionists
• local businesses
• basically everyone except the barn cat, who contributes nothing and still expects full health benefits

Even the barn mice are discussing the economy now, and they usually only discuss granola crumbs.

And here’s the painful part for my tiny Jersey soul:

Some herds are setting up ship dates.
Not “if things get bad.”
Not “maybe someday.”
Already in process.
Cows leaving Whatcom County because the numbers waved a white flag.

So here I stand — a squishy dairy baby with eyelashes strong enough to start international diplomacy — telling you the truth:

Local farms cannot survive on $13.43.

Not when each cow is costing a farm more than she is able to contribute.

Not when feed, labor, equipment, and water rules cost what they do.

If people care about local food, local jobs, local farms, or adorable baby Jerseys with big dreams and tiny hooves…

Care now. Pay attention now. Speak up now.

Because once the farms disappear, the cows disappear.

And once the cows disappear…so do the communities built around them.

And honestly?
I am far too dramatic and high-maintenance to thrive anywhere except a dairy farm.

11/21/2025

We were definitely not expecting this!
Thanks everyone for sending congratulations!

Congratulations to Saddle Hills County's 2025 Farm Family - Cole, Britney, Stella, and Beau Jacob, owners of Burnt River Ranch, in Woking, AB! 👨‍🌾🚜

For the full story, visit saddlehills.ab.ca/AgNews