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Last winter, a university ag economist told a group of producers in the Midwest he wouldn’t advise his students to pursue studies that fulfill their personal dreams.
Clay’s passion was always cattle. He wanted to get back to the home place in Starr, South Carolina, and start a cattle operation in the worst way and with the quickest route possible.
“Simply put, the western U.S. livestock industry is dominant in areas of the West that are not suited for farming,” said Tim DelCurto at the Western Alfalfa and Forage Symposium in Reno, Nevada.
What you see at a ranch production sale is a crowd of cowboy hats resting on the heads of potential buyers who eye uncharacteristically clean cattle kicking up sawdust on their way through a sale ring.
Problem: You’re frustrated – you send hay samples to multiple labs and the variability between them is high. What gives?
Yes, variability among labs exists; no one denies that. Before we lay blame on the lab, however, let’s make sure you understand the analysis.
At the recent Western Alfalfa and Forage Symposium in Reno, Nevada, participants were asked to respond to a clicker survey-quiz, as presented by forage specialists Glenn Shewmaker (University of Idaho), Dan Putnam (University of California – Davis) and Shannon Mueller (University of California – Fresno Extension).
You say you have Supreme hay and want top dollar for it. The buyers say, “Prove it,” because they aren’t paying a dime more than they have to. And that’s when your expertise at choosing a lab and taking hay samples really affects outcome. If you “do it right,” you can indeed prove its value.
Clichés we should drop from our everyday speech might include, “It is what it is.” I actually used that in an email today and thought, “That’s a stupid statement.” It’s a five-word waste of breath, a 16-character waste of keystrokes. Of course it is what it is – what else would it be?
