Many beef producers may need a plan B when it comes to winter forages due to dry conditions, says Dr. Jason Banta, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service beef cattle specialist, Overton.

With 500 acres of dallisgrass, bermudagrass, fescue and johnsongrass, David Long will take one to four cuttings a year and put up 650 to 700 round bales in Waldron, Arkansas, for his registered Brahman herd.

Every five years or so, most of the major beef processors in the U.S. are audited, sampling 10 percent of a fed or non-fed beef plant’s kill and funded by the Beef Checkoff.

As December rolls in and the end of 2017 nears, now is a good time for reflection. Naturally, we are excited to start looking ahead and setting those New Year’s resolutions, wishing to put the last year behind us and rather focus on the excitement of planning for the future.

Winter is officially here. That means bundling up for those early morning hours and struggling with the environment of your cattle’s living quarters.

The old village may as well have been erased from a map. Those who lived there were broken, feeble and hungry. War had come and gone. Disease had been a familiar foe.

The House of Representatives passed the Resilient Federal Forests Act in November, earning praise from the ag community. The bill, introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., addresses the roadblocks to reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires and the budgetary problems caused by “fire borrowing,” or taking the budget allotted to forest management and other activities to fund fighting wildfires.

The 2017 U.S. commercial beef production forecast was lowered slightly from last month at the time of this writing to 26.6 billion pounds. Beef production in 2018 is projected up 20 million pounds from the previous month to 27.3 billion pounds on heavier fed cattle weights during the year.

Cattle don’t like processing days because it’s out of their comfort zone. It’s a lot like men going clothes shopping with their wives. Processing days are stressful events. More people are around.

Typically, when we think of cold stress, we think of feedlot cattle performance being affected, not the cow herd. However, cold stress can impact the cow herd’s productivity and requirements too.