Occasionally, a cow loses a calf at birth or a calf loses its mother, and you need to “graft” the orphan or a substitute calf onto another cow to raise.

Beef quantity and quality importance are on the rise. Feedlots, packing plants and end consumers are demanding higher-quality meat, which means there is a need for more efficient feeder calves.

As one of the five distinct geographical areas in Texas, east Texas is primarily comprised of the Piney Woods ecoregion, but also includes part of the Gulf Coast Prairies, Post Oak Savannah and Blackland Prairies ecoregions.

I’m an admitted sports junkie. I’ve sometimes wondered about just where I could have gone in life if I’d used some of my limited brainpower to store important information regarding physics, the arts or molecular biology. Instead, I’ve expended considerable energy memorizing more “useful” data.

When to calve is a decision that has many factors, and much has been written and discussed about this question.

One of the unwritten rules that city people live by is that if you haven’t heard a rumor by 10 o’clock in the morning, then you are supposed to start one. Ordinarily, I don’t care about such gossipy town talk, unless it’s about me of course, but years ago my wife and I were the victim of a very damaging rumor. And it was started by none other than the local police in the town where we leased a ranch.

“The data is clear – Calves that arrive healthy and stay healthy at the feedlot make more money.” This was printed in bold letters at the beginning of an article in one of our industry publications. What? I read the headline again. I turned it over and read it upside-down. It must be a trick question. A play on words? There must be a deeper meaning to this bold statement. Should it have said … “Calves who stay healthy, etc., have better eyesight, higher IQs, are tastier, are better at hopscotch, have a better chance of being featured in a vaccine ad?”

Beef flavor is important to consumers, and fortunately beef quality grades do a good job of predicting it, says Deb VanOverbeke, of Oklahoma State University. This video news is provided by Certified Angus Beef LLC and the American Angus Association.

More than 80 percent of producers in North Dakota likely had bulls actively breeding cows on their pastures on Aug. 1 (summary data from the PregCard project, The Research Corner; The Ranch Hand, November 2012).