Brinda Dass of the GeneConvene Global Collaborative talks about the ongoing threat of New World screwworm and what biocontrol technologies might exist to help the U.S. livestock industry combat this pest.

Leave the land better than you found it. That’s the charge given to the ranchers who are members of Country Natural Beef.

Doyle Sanders didn’t go to Turkey in 2016 with cattle on his mind. Well, that’s probably not entirely true; Sanders – who owns Dbl D Bar Ranch in central Texas and is a tireless advocate for the Beefmaster breed – is likely to have bovine on the brain at any given point in time.

Phenotype is what puts pounds on calves, beef in bellies and dollars in bank accounts. While significant genetic progress has never been more attainable, optimizing an environment to fully take advantage of that careful genetic selection remains a challenge for many producers.

As it always is, the 2025 edition of the Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) Symposium – hosted June 9-12 in Amarillo, Texas, by West Texas A&M University – delivered boatloads of cutting-edge research results and practical applications of genetic tools.

We did something stupid. A couple of years back, my wife and I took the kids to the animal shelter in town on Free Cat Day and let them pick out a couple of kittens. But that wasn’t the stupid thing.