I was asked by the author of Confessions of a Horseshoer* if he could use one of my quotes in his book. I agreed. He sent me a copy. The quote he used was: “It’s not that horseshoeing is so hard, it’s just the dread of doing it.”

Highly respected dairyman and advocate for the Idaho dairy industry Dr. Bill Stouder, DVM, of Buhl, Idaho, ended his 13-month battle with cancer on March 30 and passed away at home at the age of 70. He was born on September 21, 1941, in Huntington Park, California, the son of Russell LaVon and Vera Belle Williams Stouder.

Reporting to you from Yambio, Western Equatoria state, South Sudan, Africa … On a hot Thursday afternoon, we drove east from the capital city of Yambio, Western Equatoria state in South Sudan. I sat with two officials of the state Ministry of Agriculture, an official from the state Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and two persons from one of our U.S. government implementing partners. The road, a bed of red sandy soil and gravel, wound through the bush. We were in the Greenbelt, so called because of the rainfall here for seven to eight months of the year and the relative productivity of the land to grow nearly any kind of crop. However, most of the landscape was native vegetation, an amazing collection of trees, undergrowth and grass. This was truly the bush.

A new tool for livestock producers, an online network of pasture lease listings called PastureScout, was launched recently to help ranchers find pasture leases.

USDA Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. John Clifford answers a series of questions about the newly discovered BSE case in a California dairy cow.  

The USDA confirmed on Tuesday that an “atypical case” of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, was found and confirmed in a central California dairy cow headed for a rendering plant. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said it was the nation’s fourth case of BSE, and the animal is being held under state authority and will be destroyed.

The beef industry’s aggressive push to defend finely textured lean beef in the aftermath of “pink slime” reporting is completely warranted, even if it comes a day late and a dollar short. We could certainly blame social media, slipshod reporting or an uninformed consumer base. But that would ignore a fundamental modern-day reality. The uproar over lean trimmings in ground beef shows, yet again, that a seismic shift has hit the marketplace.