Are you profitable as a cattle producer at current prices? Don’t you lie to me, or worse, yourself. The elevated prices in 2014-2015 were great, but we all knew it couldn’t and wouldn’t last.

I recently saw an ad on Facebook for The Bachelor of a bunch of very well-dressed young ladies feeding dairy calves and shoveling manure out of a cattle barn. It was like a train wreck – painful to watch, but I couldn’t look away!

It wasn’t our first choice to calve our heifers in January, but some things can’t be helped. It’s a risk to calve in January, especially in Idaho. But to calve in January in Idaho during a 30-year storm – well, that is downright stupid.

The wind was blowing, as it usually is through the dusty desert where our cattle seasonally graze. It came in gusts out of the west that day.

The Christmas season marks the end of the year and is a great time to reflect on our year and to look forward to the next. It's a time to celebrate the birth of our Savior and the new covenant the book of Jeremiah promised. It's also a great time to reflect on the blessings of the past year.

Marci WhitehurstCowboy lingo: Understanding a cowboy’s grunts and gestures

Dairy feeder steers are the red-headed stepchild of the beef industry – at least that is what we like to call them. I learned that idiom from my dad. It is his favorite. You can use it to describe pretty much anything – a sore on your big toe, an ugly runt in a litter of puppies or, in our case, a few black and whites in a pasture of Angus genetics.

“You’ll go just past Mineral Springs and hang a right at the camp trailer. If you pass a random recliner on a switchback in the road, you went too far. You will know when you’ve made it to the paint cans because you get service and there is a little clearing in the sagebrush.”

What is it about election years that makes everyone dread them? If you ask most people, they will say they get tired of the politicians slinging mud at each other.

Haying has lasted unusually long for us this year. Thanks to a cool, long spring and some well-timed rains in May and June, we ended up with a bumper crop of grass-alfalfa hay this year.