It’s a labor of love, obvious in the way she lights up explaining their family’s 33-year effort to proactively adapt Angus cows to their land. A lifetime of telling stories from the pasture or kitchen has resonated with nonfarm consumers as much as fellow ranchers. “Everything we do is about cattle, but it’s also about family and connecting our kids to the land and to the cattle,” Debbie Lyons-Blythe says.
Before there were fences and farms in the Panhandle, stirrup high grasses owned the land. With time, they have dwindled to near extinction. And with time again, they’re resurrecting. Nothing is a one-year thought process. Just like building a fence, they determine whether their decisions will last the next 50 years.
In everything he does, Ryan Noble pushes the limits of success to what some would call overachieving. To everyone else, it’s no surprise Noble Ranch was named the Certified Angus Beef ® 2019 Commercial Commitment to Excellence Award winner.
It’s a great time to own cows, but only if you have a competitive cost structure with the right genetics and management to compete in today’s marketplace, Rick Funston said. While input costs should be minimized in times like these, “breakeven at best” for many, he said, it won’t pay to compromise fertility in the process.
You hear more about mature cow size and growth potential of calves, now that profit ebbs and flows with the cycle. We’ve written about mature size, but not much about how to use the relevant tools to change it. So now, let’s examine the strategies and tools available, and the unintended consequences of ignoring them.
Let’s say you weaned calves last fall but didn’t sell. Instead, you helped them cross the bridge to independent life in your dry lot pen and maybe on to a grazing program. Chances are, those “backgrounded” calves have moved on to a finishing yard or the next phase of heifer development.
You’ve heard that the key to beef quality could lie in making sure a calf never has a bad day. A paper in the Journal of Dairy Science adds validity—and before you quit reading because the work didn’t come from the beef side, think for a minute about the dairy cow. She’s a model of uniform genetics and focused selection with little nutritional limit to gene expression. She can serve as a great model to evaluate environment for all cows, independent of genetics and nutritional resources.
Angus cattle need to do more than ever before. Carcass quality, functional females, feedlot performance—they all matter. That theme was evident at the Innovation Workshops during the National Angus Convention, Nov. 4 to 7, in Indianapolis, Ind.
Sometimes there’s more than what meets the eye. This week, the cattlemen and women of the Show-Me Select Replacement Heifer Program learned just that.
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