Now here's more with my conversation with Cole Buffo from southwest Kansas. Do you raise your own feed?

"Yeah, we do all our own alfalfa. We've got about 140 acres of alfalfa ground that we put up. We can usually get about four cuttings a year out of, and it's all along the creek. So, I mean, it's usually pretty decent for us."

How's your moisture this year?

"We're a little dry. I know we're trying to figure out when to start planting milo. It would be nice to get a little rain to get a little moisture. Wheat's kind of turning. I mean, it's either turning, dying, and got frost all in the same little bit."

Is it going to be zeroed out by insurance?

"We haven't fully got that far in getting it all checked out yet with insurance. So, they'll tell us that we'll still have to cut it."

Do you ever swath it?

"Sometimes we do. A lot of times we may. Our big focus is cattle, so we run registered, and then we've got a commercial herd. So, we'll do a lot of grazing on it. We don't do much swathing of wheat. We'll just either graze it or out or cut it for grain."

Do you do all of your own cutting?

"Yeah, yeah. We do all our own cutting. I mean, we're primarily wheat, alfalfa, and milo. It's our crops, and then cattle's kind of our mainstay, I guess."

Yeah, so how many years have you been doing the cattle now, did you say?

"I've been in the cattle business, I'd say, 25 years, but my in-laws, they've been in it. I mean, my wife's the third generation to be taking over the family farm, and our kids will be the fourth. I mean, they've been doing it since the early 1900s."

Cole Buffo from southwest Kansas.

Thanks again for listening, and may God bless. I'm Brian Hale.

I have Cole Buffo on the phone with me with Buff Tuff Cattle Co, if I've got the name right. Welcome to the show, Cole, and if you don't mind, just kind of give us a background on that name there and how you got started in the cattle business.

"Yeah, so it was actually a nickname, a buddy of mine that I grew up with kind of gave me back when we were in middle school. And I mean, I got started when I was in grade school with cattle, we started in the Simmental and then kind of dispersed and then got back in the Gelbvieh side of it. And then now that after college, I married my wife, Cassie, and we moved to Jetmore, Kansas north of Dodge city. She and her family had an established Red Angus operation. So now we got Gelbvieh with our Red Angus. We were primarily red and we've kind of got into the black because we had a few customers needing some black bulls. So we started doing some cross breeding to compliment our customer needs."

"Like on the Red Angus side, a lot of guys have been crossing Angus in to incorporate Angus genetics on the Red Angus. So they're getting black, red carriers, and then they can get black or red calves depending on what they're breeding. And that's kind of what we've been playing with a little more on our Gelbvieh side. If we trying to breed for homo black bulls, but if we get a red bull out of a black cow, we still know we can sell it."

Do you have a sale each year?

"Yeah, so it's usually, I would say the last Friday in March, I guess next year might be a week later with Easter season. We used to be private treaty. Now we're gone to an open house, silent auction type format where we do invite everybody in kind of low key, like all of our buyers kind of see what the bulls are and see how they are. And then it's just kind of a silent auction format."

That was Cole Buffo from Buff Tuff Cattle Co.

22918 NW Highway 156, Jetmore, KS 67854 is the address for Hayes Red Angus, a cattle ranching operation and member of the Red Angus Association of America. The property also serves as the headquarters for Buff Tuff Cattle Co., which specializes in raising Gelbvieh, Balancer, and Red Angus cattle.

Welcome to the Cattleman's Corner. I'm Brian Hale, sitting in for the late Howard Hale, as we continue his legacy of speaking with cattlemen and women from around the globe.

We're talking to Ted Delagana.

Ted is now from Conrad, Montana, but used to be in, was it the Central Valley in California?

"Central Coast, is what we call it."

You were involved in agriculture down there?

"Yep, all my life."

What kind of things did you do?

"We always had cattle, and then worked for different places that had cattle, and always raised our own hay for the cattle up until when we left. And then I worked for a large place that we farmed about 3,000 acres of dryland grain and hay. Hay there is all oats and barley hay, so it's all just grain hay."

On this side of the Madison line, my dad always called it green feed.

"Pretty much. We had a whole different world there, a lot of rain down there. So, why did you have the cereal grains for hay, or green feed as we call it up here, instead of like something, perennial grass? Not many, we hardly had, a lot of alfalfa hay, a lot of alfalfa, but perennial grass like they have here, almost zero. The ranch I worked for we summer followed, but where I lived, we planted winter so every year. It was just a rain thing, I think, you know, the amount of rain we get."

Could you get more tons per acre off of doing green feed?

"There was alfalfa ranches around and they would get a ton and a half per cutting or so, I'd say, and cut five, sometimes six cuttings. But with our grain hay, we'd get as much as five times the acre on grain hay. You know, we were all selling to cattlemen, feedlots, and then we got fancy stuff. We started growing what they called forage mix. It was a mix of beardless barley, beardless wheat, and a couple varieties of oats. And we'd sell those to the racetracks like Santa Anita and a lot of horse people."

Ted Dalagana from Conrad, Montana with our co-host David Woodruff.