Sometimes birds can be a nuisance. I don’t care if they are blackbirds, pigeons, seagulls, starlings or guinea hens. Starlings have always been a problem for feedlots. They eat a lot of grain, besides desecrating the feed bunks. One particular afternoon when I was having visions of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, I sent one of the feedlot hands to town to get some replicas of owls. I had read that decoy owls would scare off birds. I left that afternoon before he returned.

Dairy farming is a complex business which demands accurate records and careful financial management. Both financial and production records are required in order to provide the information on which the farm manager can make critical decisions. Unfortunately, since farming is widely viewed as “a way of life” rather than a business, the financial management tools long available in other industries have not been universally embraced by producers.

Sheryl Crow, a popular pop singer, made headlines in 2007 by proposing a method to waste less natural resources. It made us cowboys look environmentally ahead of our time. A purist global warming star said we should use less paper

I am on assignment in Russia for two weeks. I will write three articles about this assignment; this is the first one. For this article, I am writing about the assignment itself … why I am here, what I hope to accomplish and some general comments about the area of interest.

Forage and feed costs may soon exceed 70 percent of the operational costs of your dairy.

Bruce and Brad Scott of Scott Brothers Dairy located in San Jacinto, California, have big plans this fall.

Years ago, Don Carlos Vargas ran his dairy like most everyone else in Costa Rica.

Red Barn Family Farms in Wisconsin introduced a new brand of milk this spring that was the first of its kind.

The Federal Milk Marketing Orders are a collective enterprise designed to work for the benefit of the whole, not a few.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series of articles that discuss milk pricing.