There’s a good chance you’ve spent a good bit of time and resources getting your ducks in a row nutritionally to improve the odds of your cattle staying healthy and thriving. Maybe you know the nutrient values of your feeds and have worked with a nutritionist to make sure rations are balanced for energy, protein, minerals and vitamins for every situation.

If you own cattle, at some point you will drive out in the pasture and find one with all four feet in the air – or close to it. For stocker or backgrounding cattle producers accustomed to working with newly purchased, highly stressed animals either from the sale barn or from an order buyer, this is not uncommon.

Beef cattle producers have a wide variety of vaccines to choose from, including modified-live and inactivated products, to improve animals’ immunity against infectious reproductive diseases. With this variety comes questions regarding the choice of these products and the timing of their use.

What would you say if I told you that, for approximately $1.30 per animal, you could improve calf performance by 0.11 pound per day when you use implants? That means for just over $1 per animal, you could be adding anywhere from $20 to $30 of value per calf.

Taking a DNA sample at the time of performing a breeding soundness exam is now recommended to add information about the bull’s breeding value.

Choosing whether to buy bred heifers or breed your own replacements requires an honest assessment of your time, resources and energy to put into the work.

Nov. 17, 2017, was a big day in our lives. It’s a day my wife and I have been working toward since we were teenagers. It’s the day we signed up for Social Insecurity.

The Matthews boys had gathered their cattle down off of the Camel Rock piece a few days before the real rank weather hit. The next day, Broden called to let us know he’d seen a pair of ours up on the hillside above Emerson Green Spring.

If our wives had picked their husbandswith the care we buy a bullThere’d be a lot morebachelors on the street.

Timber commodity prices have been doing well this past year. This is from fortunate reasons such as the increases in the housing market – and unfortunate reasons such as natural disasters.