If you’ve spent the past few years watching your kids or grandkids typing away on Facebook and Twitter, and muttering how such antics are a waste of time, then you’re not alone. You’re also dead wrong. The days of ignoring social media skills in the ag industry are now gone. And if you insist on remaining ignorant to modern communication, it’s only time before you’ll be gone too. Marketing and message management have put power into consumers’ hands and with agriculture that war of words is being dictated by our critics.

Graham Land and Cattle Co. serves south Texas feeders with pen capacity for 30,000 head and enough pasture to background another 15,000 head.

It has been forecast that more food must be produced in the next 40 years than in the prior history of the world to meet the needs of the growing world population. Furthermore, these increases in food production need to occur in an era of agriculture that has greater regulations, reduced available land for production, dramatically increasing input costs and declining animal numbers.

The beef industry in the U.S. has always been based on producing a high-quality, safe, wholesome product that appeals to the consumer’s palate.

Editors note: Click here to read the first of this two part series. No story of the American West can be told without including a strong sense of place. Is landscape a determinant? What about weather and its much older cousin, climate?

I constantly encounter ranchers, conservationists and even professional range managers who are more than a bit confused by some grazing semantics. Particularly by the concepts of overgrazing, overutilization and over-resting.