In recent years, feed costs have represented more than 60 percent of the cost of producing milk, and feed prices have been high relative to the sale price of milk. Now that milk prices are finally on the rise so are inputs, especially corn, which is not good news for dairy farmers.

Texas A&M's Ralph Bruno explained the causes and symptoms of the metabolic disease ketosis in this 2011 article. to jump to the article. Because this Herd Health article has been so popular, we asked Bruno a follow-up question: Q: What is the most often overlooked way of preventing or reducing the risk of ketosis? Ketosis is a metabolic disease very often observed in high producing herds. It is associated with poor management of the transition period resulting in decreased dry matter intake and increased BCS loss (fat mobilization) therefore, increasing blood circulating levels of ketone bodies.

As we horse owners and lovers struggle to find some middle ground in the tragic abandoned horse issue, maybe we need to look “outside the box.”

There is much in the news today about unrest and revolution in the world. The “common man” rising up and asking: “Why do we live like this, when we have seen how others live?” The connectivity of our communication systems brings every corner of the world to our computer screens, our BlackBerrys, and our social media.

Last week was another volatile price week for both corn and cattle prices. On Thursday, March 31 USDA-NASS released its long anticipated annual Prospective Plantings Report, which many livestock producers hoped would show increased corn acreage for 2011. Increased acres were needed to replenish the relatively short supplies and slow the increasing prices of corn. On Monday through Wednesday the nearby May corn futures contract declined 26 1/4 cents a bushel and the new-crop December futures lost 14 1/4 cents, as trade expectations for increased corn acreage surfaced.

Americans may have noticed a new social media trend this past year: more Facebook posts from the farm, more tweets from the tractor and more blogs from the back forty. The timing of this social media "stampede" couldn’t be better, says Jeff Fowle, president of the AgChat Foundation. Celebrating its one-year anniversary today, the AgChat Foundation is a 100-percent volunteer organization formed to empower farmers and ranchers to effectively tell their stories using social media.

At their recent meeting, the Holstein Association USA board of directors voted to declare Brachyspina as an undesirable recessive trait in the Holstein breed, and approved the recording of testing results on Holstein Association USA pedigrees and other performance products. Brachyspina is expressed when an animal is homozygous for the undesirable allele, meaning that two carrier animals have been mated. Holsteins that are known carriers will be labeled with the code BY, and tested non-carriers will be labeled TY.