Like most people involved in selling livestock, I believe that the faster you sell them, the better it is. When it comes to auctions, the speechifying should be kept to a bare minimum. For one thing, there’s usually nothing anyone can say that the ranchers on the seats don’t already know. Cattlemen these days are very astute; they’ve had to be to have survived this long, and they’ve studied all the numbers, EPDs and statistics to know which stock they want and how bad they want them.

There are a lot of different opinions regarding which antibiotics are best for treating common infections – for example, pneumonia and foot rot. How can a cow-calf producer make the best decision about which product to use and when?

An interviewer asked me how one can make a living in the cow business. Actually he said, “As we’re heading into the next couple of years with declining cattle numbers and steady prices, how do you think you should position yourself to take advantage of the market?” I assume he’d mistaken me as an authority in the cattle business. Maybe he thought I was a Wall Street speculator who heard rumors of another run on ethanol.

Corbitt Wall feeder cattle report for Feb. 25

Stockmanship guru Curt Pate and Texas A&M University beef specialist Ron Gill discuss stockmanship tips from their seminar at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association Convention and Trade Show in Denver, Colorado, on Feb. 4, 2011.  

Twenty CattleWomen from across the United States recently received extensive public speaking training. The “National Beef Speakers Bureau” (NBSB) is part of the new “Tell the Beef Story”, a checkoff funded program managed by the American National CattleWomen, Inc.  (ANCW). 

Calving season means different things to different cattle producers. Some producers bring every heifer and cow to a calving shed. Others only bring in their heifers. Our ranch has enough winter ground that we are able to calve our cows outside. This has allowed calving to be relatively low-stress for us. We pasture breed our first-calf heifers to low birth weight bulls and check them periodically throughout the day during calving season. It works beautifully.

Beef producers in the United States have been able to effectively increase the amount of beef produced without increasing the number of animals overall through selective breeding for genetically superior animals and improved nutrition and management.