Lots of folks in the ranching industry are hearing and talking about carbon and greenhouse gas emissions – and it’s not about it being produced by livestock. It is about potential opportunities to use land management to remove carbon from the air and tuck it safely away into the soils.

Multiyear drought in much of the western U.S. has made it evident that we will have to make some tough grazing management decisions this year, and likely in the coming years as well.

Grazing management affects animal performance and both short-term and long-term pasture productivity. Grazing management includes decisions such as timing (when pastures are grazed), intensity (forage removed) and duration (how long they are grazed).

Researchers from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are working on a new way to use satellite imagery for rangeland management – using the grazing patterns to predict cattle weight gain over a period of time.

When’s the very best time to plan for a drought? That answer is simple: When it is raining.

We sat across the desk from the gentleman who had leased the ranch for the last five years. The owner and I were meeting with him, trying to suggest that we needed to change grazing methods to improve the range health.

This spring, Texas A&M AgriLife extension specialists came together from animal science, rangeland, wildlife and fisheries management, along with agricultural economics to discuss a timely topic – drought.

Grasslands are a key component of the livestock industry, with feed constituting the greatest annual cost to livestock producers. Understanding the forage resource is essential for effective and profitable grassland livestock management.

Invasive annual grasses have become problematic across the Western region because they readily outcompete more desirable perennial grasses, especially in areas that have been recently burned or where the soil and vegetation have been disturbed.

Huge orange flames and billowing black smoke – it's a fire on the land! Hearing those words, most of us probably feel fear for our families and our homes, and for our livestock and our land. We've all seen the scary images of wildfires burning out of control. No one wants to experience that. But, do these events mean all fire is bad for the land?