I drove up to Keith Long's place at Beaumont, Kansas, earlier this week to talk about saving winter stockpile forage into the spring grazing season. It's a topic I haven't covered very well in the past and when Keith and some others were talking about  the issue on Kit Pharo's discussion group I realized from his description that Long would be a good one to explain this concept to readers. Simply put, it's long been known that cattle on wheat pasture…

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  I just finished reading Bill Helming's latest economics special report to his clients and found some interesting stuff about China's economy, therefore our economy. Truth about China is always a slippery thing because their entire centrally planned economy is, of course, cloaked in lies. If you follow commodity prices you know China is always the wild card spoiler. It's been that way in cotton for at least a couple decades ... and soybeans. Now corn, maybe rice and…

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  A few days ago a small news item caught my attention because a meat market manager was complaining that changes in beef and pork labeling would cause his customers confusion. My first thought was to recall how many times I've heard John Lundeen, NCBA's beef demand guru, talk about consumer ignorance concerning beef cuts and cooking. Changing the name couldn't really matter, I thought. Nonetheless I went searching for what change might have occurred and whether it…

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  A few days ago the Environmental Working Group publicized and sensationalized data from a year-old research report on antibiotic-resistant bacteria in supermarket-collected meat samples. It was fundamentally yellow journalism and it naturally ended in a call for more government regulation and control, as is typical for this group. The press release was called "Superbugs Invade American Supermarkets" and focused on a small section of the 2011 report of the National…

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  I'm working this week on stories for the June issue of Beef Producer and digging into some juicy financial data from real ranches. I've been working with Stan Bevers of Texas AgriLife extension service again. Bevers keeps the Southwest SPA database, also known as the Standardized Performance Analysis of real cow operations in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. SPA was initiated in 1992 by some Extension Service educators and the National Cattlemen's Association…

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The animal health industry is taxing itself... sort of. In reality the industry is collectively asking for reauthorization of the Animal Drug User Fee Act, a program whereby a significant portion of the costs of drug review is paid by the industry. In fact, this piece of legislation pays about 40% of the cost of drug review at the center for veterinary medicine, says Ron Phillips, vice president for legislative and public affairs at the Animal Health Institute. He explains it is…

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  A few days ago Bruce Anderson with the University of Nebraska did a nice radio broadcast about herbicide carryover damaging annual forage crops. Considering the state of many perennial pastures in the nation I think it's information worth passing along. Annual forages may be a big component of beef production this year and could give some much-needed recovery time to abused pastures. "Many annual forages are sensitive to herbicide carryover, such as from…

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  This winter when I was in Florida for a national grazing lands meeting I attended a session titled "Mob grazing to control smutgrass." That's not what it was about. It was about research on doubling the stocking density from 3,000 pounds per acre to 6,000 pounds per acre and measuring "control" of smutgrass or lack thereof. Of course, the researchers were able to find no measurable improvement in smutgrass grazing by the cattle at these low-density…

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  A few days ago I drove up to Booneville, Missouri, to hear Gabe Brown and David Brandt prove soil health and profits are improved using multi-species cover crops and mob grazing on crop ground. Gabe Brown and his family were arguably the founders of the no-till, multi-species cover-cropping movement which is now spreading well beyond their home in North Dakota. I went to see Brown clear back in 2008 and the data he had amassed at that time with the help of local NRCS and a young…

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  It seems to me a new e-newsletter from Kris Ringwall in North Dakota picks the scab off the wound I keep reopening -- the fact we still have some financial woes in our high-priced industry. Ringwall, a beef specialist for NDSU, says new numbers from the North Dakota Farm Management Program show 40% of the cow-calf beef producers are "struggling to justify being in the beef business." Ringwall analyzed net returns per cow from 2006 through 2011 and says he found beef…

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