Tips on rebuilding Texas cattle herds and an update on livestock traceability will be featured topics at the 51st Blackland Income Growth Conference scheduled Feb. 4-6 at the Extraco Events Center in Waco. “We think we have something for everyone, and producers will take home plenty of strategies they can incorporate into their operations,” said Ron Woolley, conference coordinator and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service regional program director at Stephenville.

This past year, my colleagues and I at Progressive Publishing have been reading some of the history behind the explorer Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who led the first modern exploration team to reach the South Pole. At the age of 39, Amundsen took a five-man company 1,400 miles in a period of four months across the frigid Antarctic landscape, literally not knowing which hazards and dangers lay before them. Preparations for the journey took years and painstaking detail. Amundsen had to envision any possible challenge that would come in a polar geography where temperatures routinely hit 20 degrees below zero.

For as long as I have been a commodity broker, hope has never been a word to use in agricultural risk management. However, I find myself hoping for normal seasonally weather changes. There is one thing for certain; I am not alone hoping current weather patterns will change. Cattle producers especially in the Plains and Southwest are going into the third year of a drought.

The cattle industry’s biggest annual event, the Cattle Industry Convention & NCBA Trade Show, is Feb. 6-9 in Tampa, Florida. This year’s events are held at the Tampa Convention Center and follow the theme “Boots on the Bay.” The NCBA Trade Show runs from Feb. 6-8, with a variety of stockman demonstrations, cattle-handling seminars, live music, food sponsorships and “Cattlemen to Cattlemen” broadcasts from the trade show floor.

10. Anticipate muddy or icy conditions Cattle can do tremendous damage to muddy or frozen wheat/rye pasture by trampling it.

Australian beef exports to Russia have been slow in 2012, with shipments for the first 10 months of 2012 to 29,939 metric tons (MT), down 40 percent year-on-year. But while Australian exports to Russia were sluggish throughout 2012, the Russian imported beef market heated up as the year progressed. By the end of September, Russian beef imports totaled 468,292 MT, 2 percent higher than the same period last year.

One of the latest developments in beef cattle breeding is the use of genomic testing results in animal selection and mating decisions. Genomics is the study of organism genomes that includes mapping DNA sequences.