"Corky" Bryan - Hawaii Cattlemens Council

CB: I’m just a cowboy, you know, doing what I did for that year and a half over was just about killing me anyway. But you know, it was a good experience. I learned a lot of things. I learned you can’t grow corn, youcan’t grow alfalfa… I mean we did… we tried all of that stuff and…LW:And that all relates to cattle, too.CB:Yeah.LW:Alfalfa certainly does and…CB: And we actually made a little feed yard down at Upolu Point and fed some of Kalani Schutte’s cattledown there and they did really good. The first bunch of sileage we put up was really nice. The second bunchwasn’t worth a damn… the cows started losing weight instead of gaining weight, you know.LW:Oh, it didn’t have the nutrients in it or what?CB: Yeah we just didn’t do a good job. Putting up silage is a real hard thing. You get a bunch of plantationguys that really never done it before, well there was a guy that knew about that from the mid-West but youknow… plantation… and this is not meant to be negative or anything, but this is just a mindset. Back in themid-West, if you missed a day of harvest you’re dead, you know. On a plantation you got a two year crop butcorn’s a 90 day crop for silage so, 90 days, you got to get it out. You just got to do it. 24 hours a day,whatever it takes, you got to do it. Well plantation was different because you had a 2 year crop, in some casesout there a 3 year’s crop. And it didn’t make any difference if you couldn’t get in the field this week. You get innext week. It’s not going to make that much difference in the whole scheme of things so it was just a wholedifferent mentality. Not bad or good or whatever. Just the way they were. And that’s one of the things Ilearned about… by being out there… was that difference and I did… not that I didn’t… I had… I had theplantation mentality. God, we grew up that way, you know. But I could see all of a sudden there was adisconnect ‘cause all the guys that worked at the grain company were all ex-plantation guys. They didn’tunderstand. It just wasn’t their fault. They just never… they didn’t understand why these things were socritical. And I didn’t either. But one day makes a hell of a difference so any way let’s end it. That’s it for today.LW:Your real calling was as a cattleman, yeah?CB: Yeah, I was… I was a cowboy. That’s all there was to it, you know. And so… I had a chance tocowboy at Pu’u Wa’awa’a for 10 years which was fabulous and I just… learned a lot of stuff. Broke a lot offingers, you know.