Shipping day should be more than, “We got them on the truck, and they’re gone.” Forward thinking and improved management practices can reduce challenges on this important payday by keeping stress and shrink to a minimum.

Even with the best of intentions, situations exist where the calving season gets to be longer than ever intended. Conditions that result in poorer body condition at calving and breeding can lead to delayed return to estrus and a long calving season the following year.

Heather Smith Thomas has raised cattle since the age of 12, and owns and operates a cow-calf ranch in Salmon, Idaho with her husband Lynn. She is the author of several prominent books on raising cattle, including “The Cattle Health Handbook,” the “Essential Guide to Calving” and “Storey’s Guide to Raising Beef Cattle.” Her work is also featured regularly in several horse and livestock publications.

I should be pushing up daisies in some bone orchard right now after having flown on hundreds of flights piloted by auctioneers, cattle buyers, stocker operators and feedlot owners. I’d be in good company because there have been enough country western singers, auctioneers, rodeo announcers and cowboys die in airplane crashes that you could put together an impressive Plane Crash Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Sandra Silverstone’s fingers skated over the dusty top of the mahogany dining room table. She watched the letters of her name appear on the beautiful wood. How did Bart convince her to sell it? She sighed. Bart liked things in order. Anything that hadn’t been used in the last six months must be discarded. He was right, of course. They hadn’t used the table for several years. The beanbags and the easy chairs facing the huge wide screen T.V. didn’t match the antique French provincial dining room set.

Most of us use the terms taste and flavor interchangeably, but they’re actually different. Taste refers to the five basic receptors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (the one we didn’t learn about in school).

Typically smaller, more rural communities have no veterinarian, or at least none that will take a calving call or a horse colic emergency. Veterinary schools, veterinary associations, concerned farmers and isolated ranchers continue their search for new veterinarians interested in practicing Food Animal and Equine medicine. While we are searching in our front yard it is possible that the answer is sneaking up behind us.

This Memorial Day my thoughts go back to a friend from college, Clovis May. Mild mannered, hard working, good cowboy from a ranching family in Deming, New Mexico. I don’t recall exactly what his major was, but probably Range Management or Ag Business. He was big enough to play football, but he rodeoed. A solid man in character, physicality and reliability.

As the percent of farmers continues to decrease in proportion to the population, it seems the harder the ANTIs (HSUS, PETA, Sierra Club, name one) try to increase America’s dependence on foreign food just as they have done with manufacturing, energy, timber and steel. They have the foresight of a mayfly.

Many of us took a meats course in college or have dressed wild game and have a basic understanding of how it gets from the pasture to the plate. Harry is not one of us, in that regard.