A Day in the Life

All women work. From staying home to raise a family and care for a household to crunching numbers in an office, women work in all walks of life and commerce. This month, we start a new feature called “A Day in the Life” where we take a look at the life of a different working woman. This month: the modern farm wife.

DROP-IN:

“She is a farm wife, not a farmer’s wife. There’s a big difference.”

Dave Beach, about his wife Gail

A farm wife’s life

By Stephanie Abbajay

Number of acres: 760. Number of cattle: 140. Others to care for: 20 chickens, 5 dogs, 5 kids, 2 cats, 2 horses, and 1 husband. Hours of operation: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Life on the farm: priceless.

For Gail Beach, living on a farm is both a lifestyle (the 24-7 part) and a dream (the priceless part). She and her husband of 29 years, David Beach, own and operate a 760-acre cattle farm in rural Jersey County where they raise registered Black Angus and grow cash crops and silage for their herd.

Dave is a consulting geologist for the petroleum industry and is gone about half of every month, so much of the day-to-day management of the farm falls to Gail.

“She is a farm wife, not a farmer’s wife,” said Dave Beach. “There’s a big difference.”

Though there really isn’t a typical day on the farm, Gail said most days begin early with greeting the farm hands to go over that day’s assignments. Then, she may help feed animals, run into town to buy supplies or parts, pay bills, do payroll, and handle whatever other business comes up. She is also still raising her children, who range in age from 17 to 27.

One of Gail’s favorite farm jobs is breeding their herd.

“My husband and I manage the fertility cycle together, “she said. “But I am the A.I. technician, so I do the artificial insemination. We breed twice a year, about 40 at a time.”

For those unfamiliar with artificial insemination of cattle, it involves a shoulder length rubber glove, a very long injection device and, well, other ingredients.

“Small arms help, too,” Gail said.

The A.I. process is one that Beach finds particularly rewarding.

“When it works its really exciting,” she said. “We use cutting edge genetics to produce the best possible animals.”

Beach wasn’t always a farm girl and, in fact, considered herself an outdoorsy city girl before she started raising cattle. She was born in North Carolina, but her family moved around to Pennsylvania, New York and Colorado before she settled in Florida, where she met her husband.

“After we married, we moved around quite a bit, too for Dave’s job,” she said. “We lived in Miami, Wyoming, Texas, Cork, Ireland and back to Texas before settling on the farm here in Jersey County in 2001.”

The Beaches didn’t begin farming until they returned from Ireland in 1997.

“We lived on 15 acres in Chappell Hill, Texas,” Gail said. “We planned to retire back on Dave’s grandparent’s farm in Jersey County, which we had purchased from their estate. So we started a herd.”

They began with five bred heifers (young cows pregnant for the first time). Gail was now a cattle farmer.

“Dave worked 62 miles a way so much of the daily care and feeding of the animals fell to me,” she said.

Beach says they lost one of the cows and two of the calves; that experience drove her back to school at Texas A & M to study beef production.

Her studies and hard work paid off: when they moved four years later to Jersey County, the herd had grown to 50. Now, it stands at 160.

Beach, like all farmers, knows that farming takes an extraordinary commitment.

“It’s a 24-hour a day, 7 day a week commitment,” she said. “No matter what you’ve planned there is always the possibility that something will come up. You just have to accept that.”

For Gail Beach, farming is a way of life, and it is a life that she loves,

“I love being out in the country and I love the animals,” she said. “I loved raising our kids in the country, where they helped farm and could hunt, fish and be outdoors. This a healthy life, a productive life and I love it.”

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