Staying efficient and creative are becoming vital components to the beef industry as producers continue to face severe drought, low cattle numbers, high cattle prices, high input costs and consumer demands.

As calendar year 2012 comes to a close and we reflect back on the year, it’s hard to select only a few program highlights to share because there were so many. To be brief, we bring you the Top 5:

When Dan Bell drives through his 35,000-acre (14,000-hectare) cattle ranch, he speaks of the hurdles that the Border Patrol faces in his rolling green hills of oak and mesquite trees -- the hours it takes to drive to some places, the wilderness areas that are generally off-limits to motorized vehicles, the environmental reviews required to extend a dirt road.

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.