Optimizing Your Farm Operation: A Comprehensive Guide to Herd Health, Pasture Management, and Business Strategies

4d ago

Sell at weaning, or feed them 60 more days? The value-of-gain math at record prices.

At $400 for a 500-pound calf and $330 for a 700-pounder, every pound you add after weaning is worth something, but the price slide takes a bite out of it. How to figure the value of gain from the sale barn report, what it costs to put a pound on, and when the answer is sell now.

4d ago

Building a Resilient Farming Operation: Strategies for Success

5d ago

The first frost turns sorghum-sudan and johnsongrass into poison for a week. Nitrates never leave.

Prussic acid spikes in sorghum-family forages after a frost and in any regrowth for weeks after. Nitrates build in drought-stressed corn, sorghum, and small grains and do not go away with time or frost. The rules for grazing and haying through October, and the test that costs less than one cow.

6d ago

Trich and BVD: the two tests that belong in every fall bull and calf program

One is a venereal disease that turns a 92 percent conception rate into 60 and has no treatment. The other is a virus carried by a calf that looks normal and sheds it to every animal it stands next to. Both are found with a cheap test at the chute. Who to test, when, and what to do with a positive.

Oct 19

Deer season is a second crop. Leasing the hunting rights without leasing away the ranch.

Hunting lease income runs from a few dollars an acre to more than the cash rent on some ground, and it is money the cows do not know about. What a lease should say, what liability actually looks like, what a recreational-use statute does and does not protect you from, and how to keep hunters from becoming a problem for the cattle.

Oct 17