I farm on about 15,000 acres here in North Dakota. We run about 550 Angus cows so when we’re calving you could say that it gets pretty busy around here.

We don’t buy in any stock and we sell bulls, heifers and cows. I farm with my brother as well as his son and my daughter. We have one other worker here but it’s pretty much a family business.

The beef price hasn’t been so great this year. We are coming off the back of record prices two or three years ago. That was being driven by drought and the currency but the herd has recovered a lot quicker than we thought it would have. We also had a lot of beef cattle exports for three years which all just helped keep the price high.

This year has not been a good year overall. We had very dry conditions earlier in the year and now we’re being hit by blizzards. We’re used to the weather here – we’ve been here for six generations so we can deal with it. It’s the price that is more difficult to work with.

We had a sale of females on Friday and since then we’ve had about 10 inches (25cm) of snow and 40m/h (64km/h) winds.

Prices have been hit too this year; they’re especially bad right now. We sold bulls this year for $4,000 (€3,731) but they would have been $5,300 (€4,944) last year.

The females are making about $2,900 (€2,750) and we sold some six-year-old cows for $2,100 (€1,959). Right now cows are behind shelter belts and are being fed hay. The calves are being fed hay, grass silage and some corn.

We’re pretty OK for selling cattle as the nearest auction is only 20 miles from us here. Overall, we’re isolated in many ways. There are only 700 people in our entire county and the nearest big town is about 100 miles away.

Farmers, not just beef farmers, have to deal with a lot government regulation. We’re hoping that with the election of Donald Trump we will make those regulations go away.