Ranch Hands

Number of Workers Requested:  2

The basic duties of a ranch hand on a working ranch are tending livestock and repairing and cleaning fences, ranch buildings, and operating equipment. Tending livestock usually includes feeding, watering, birthing, branding, shearing, roping, sorting, pasturing, herding, grooming, or trimming, cleaning stalls and basic doctoring skills for the ranch’s horses, cattle, poultry, pigs, and/or sheep. Having raised healthy animals through this attentive care, ranch hands must also haul the livestock to market or to a shipping terminal for the purposes of selling or butchering. Ranchers specialize in nurturing and caring for these young animals. Cow-calf raisers must keep track of breeding and calving season, and they must have enough rudimentary veterinary skills to aid heifers in the birthing of calves and even in the treatment of animals that are wounded or hurt during the birthing process. Moving or herding cattle to and from different pastures, transporting animals to new locations or to market, protecting the herd from wild animals or even poachers and providing basic veterinary care to sick or injured animals as the need arises. As with any piece of property, a ranch requires a great degree of general maintenance and oversight. Because of the vastness of many ranches, this work includes tasks such as building and repairing fences to separate pastures and building and maintaining all buildings on the property, maintaining machinery, trucks, tractors, and other equipment used in ranching. Other maintenance tasks for entry level ranch jobs include grounds keeping, operating machinery such as mowing and baling hay fields,, transporting grain, barley and wheat to silos on ranch, removing dead or fallen trees and ensuring there are no poisonous or dangerous plants or animals on the property that could harm the livestock, daily irrigation of fields using modern sprinkler systems, setting up irrigation tubes to direct water to specific areas and digging new ditches to move water to new locations.