News Update
July 18, 2011

2011 North Carolina Angus Field Day

The 2011 North Carolina Angus Association Field Day will be Saturday, Sept. 17, hosted by Mark and Jason Pendleton, owners and operators of Performance Feed in Lawsonville. They also manage a cattle stocker operation. We will tour the feed production mill after lunch and see their stocker operation.

We will begin the day meeting at Emerald's View, a meeting facility located at 1426 Peter Mabe Road, Danbury, N.C. Registration will begin at 10 a.m., and the welcome and seminars around 10:30 a.m. We will enjoy lunch after the seminars and then travel to 5767 NC Hwy. 8 North to tour the feed mill and view the cattle.

Lunch will be served, so please give the office a phone call or send an email and get your name on the list. We need to know how many will be attending to plan the meal. Please let us know by Sept. 10. There are no motels in the Lawsonville area, but several in the Mount Airy, Pilot Mountain or Winston Salem area near U.S. Hwy. 52.

Gary Fike, beef cattle specialist, Certified Angus Beef LLC (CAB) is scheduled to speak as well as Tonya Amen, cattle genetics specialist for Pfizer Animal Genetics. Host Mark Pendleton will also speak on feed nutrition. Field Day committee chairman John Cassavaugh is finalizing plans, so watch our website (www.ncangus.org) for updated information.

Our annual field day is a highlight of the fall season. Performance Feed & Livestock is located in the upper edge of North Carolina, and anywhere in North Carolina is beautiful this time of year.

Start making your plans for a day of visiting with good friends, enjoying good food, viewing good Angus cattle and learning new technologies to help become better Angus producers. Watch www.ncangus.org for more details as they become available

— Release by Suzanne Brewer for the North Carolina Angus Association.

Central Texas Cow-Calf Clinic to Focus on Drought Outlook, Pasture and Herd Management Strategies

The Texas drought and the statewide outlook for beef production will headline the 2011 Central Texas Cow-Calf Clinic scheduled for 9:30 a.m.-3 p.m., Aug. 18, at the Lampasas County Farm Bureau Building, 1793 North Hwy. 281 in Lampasas.

John Nielson-Gammon, state climatologist, will give producers an update on the current statewide drought and the outlook for the coming months, said Heath Lusty, Texas AgriLife Extension Service agent for Lampasas County.

"Drought is the top issue facing ranchers throughout Texas, and it's important that we get the latest information with regards to management of cow herds and making long-range plans," Lusty said.

Bill Thomspon, AgriLife Extension economist, will provide a beef cattle market update and discuss current economic trends throughout the industry.

Following a noon meal, Larry Redmon, AgriLife Extension forage specialist, will give producers an overview of managing pastures during and after drought.

Jason Cleere, AgriLife Extension beef cattle specialist, will give a presentation on cull-cow management and body-score conditioning.

Participants with a Texas Department of Agriculture pesticide license will receive two general and one integrated pest management continuing education units. Also, two Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) credits will be given.

Cost is $20 and includes a noon barbecue meal. Registration in advance is required and can be done by calling the AgriLife Extension office in Lampasas County at 512-556-8271.

Sponsors include Brown Feed Store, Herrmann Feed, AgroTech, Tractor Supply Co. and Lampasas County Farm Bureau.

— Release by Blair Fannin for Texas A&M AgriLife Communications.

July 25-26 OSU Ag Technology Field Days to Showcase Benefits of Latest Advances

Producers interested in checking out some of the latest ag technologies should register now to attend one of two Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Ag Technology Field Day events the last week of July.

"Each field day will offer a unique mix of university, industry and producer speakers who will share their extensive agricultural expertise and offer hands-on experiences with key new technologies," said Randy Taylor, Oklahoma State University Cooperative Extension agricultural engineer.

The first field day will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, July 25, at the Northeast Technology Center in Afton, located on State Highway 69 just north of the Will Rogers Turnpike.

The second field day will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, July 26, at the Kingfisher County Fairgrounds, located at S. 13th Street in Kingfisher.

"There is no cost to attend but we do ask participants to preregister to ensure we have sufficient lunches, refreshments and field day materials on hand," Taylor said. "Lunch and refreshments are being provided free-of-charge thanks to the generosity of our sponsors."

Taylor said the field days represent one-stop shopping for producers to see firsthand how a number of different advances might potentially benefit their farm or ranch operation.

To register for the Afton field day, contact the Ottawa County Extension Office at 918-542-1688. To register for the Kingfisher field day, contact the Kingfisher County Extension Office at 405-375-3822.

"The field days are 'free choice' events wherein participants will be able to choose the presentations and field demonstrations they want to attend, as well as their time in the ride-drive areas," Taylor said.

July 25 Afton presentation topics will include the latest insights on precision nutrient management, agricultural technology and weed management, and use of GPS for surface water management.

Afton field demonstrations will focus on GPS signal precision, precision corn seed metering, and sprayer and planter section control.

July 26 Kingfisher presentation topics will include the latest insights on precision nutrient management, agricultural technology and weed management, and use of GPS for surface water management.

Kingfisher field demonstrations will focus on GPS signal precision, nozzle technology and spray drift, and sprayer and planter section control.

Sponsors for the July 25 field day in Afton include SST Software, Trimble Navigation, Wylie Sprayers, Fairbank Equipment Inc., Record Harvest, Capstan Ag Systems, P&K Equipment Inc., Hypro-SHURflo, Outback Guidance by Hemisphere GPS and the First National Bank of Vinita.

Sponsors for the July 26 field day in Kingfisher include SST Software, Trimble Navigation, Wylie Sprayers, Fairbank Equipment Inc., Capstan Ag Systems, P&K Equipment Inc., Hypro-SHURflo, Record Harvest, Outback Guidance by Hemisphere GPS, Rother Bros. Inc. and Livingston Machinery Co.

Anyone seeking additional information about the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Ag Technology Field Day events should contact Taylor by email at randy.taylor@okstate.edu or by phone at 405-744-5277.

— Release by Donald Stotts for OSU Agricultural Communications Service.

USDA Grant to Support New E. coli Research into Cattles' GI System

University of Nebraska-Lincoln scientists are taking their battle against foodborne pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7 into the belly of the beast, as it were — hoping to figure out what is in the gut of some livestock that makes them so-called "supershedders" of pathogens.

The research team, headed by food microbiologist Andy Benson, received a five-year, $2.35 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The project will build on earlier work done with lab mice by Benson and his collaborators. E. coli O157:H7 long has been known to colonize the bovine gut. Although it causes no disease symptoms in the animals, it can be transmitted to humans through improperly cooked beef, among other ways.

Preharvest E. coli research has focused primarily on the epidemiology of the disease, along with field-level and management factors that affect transmission from animal to animal, Benson said.

"More recently, studies looking at animal-level factors have shown that while many animals may be carriers of the organism, a small portion of animals shedding the organism at very high levels may account for much of the transmission risk," added Benson, the W. W. Marshall Professor of Biotechnology in UNL's Department of Food Science and Technology. Those animals are referred to as "supershedders."

E. coli research so far has yielded disease-fighting interventions primarily at slaughter and postslaughter stages of production, Benson said. With the newly funded research, scientists hope to devise some intervention strategies against the disease much earlier in the production process.

Previous research at UNL by a large team led by Benson used mice to show that genetic makeup of vertebrate hosts is a key factor in controlling the levels of individual organisms within the entire microbiota carried in the gut. This work, funded by the National Institutes of Health, combines quantitative genetics and microbiota analysis across different mouse populations.

Collaborators in this research include Stephen Kachman, a UNL statistics scientist; Etsuko Moriyama, a UNL genomics and bioinformatics scientists; and Daniel Pomp, a mouse geneticist formerly of UNL and now of the University of North Carolina.

Benson said the team's research has documented a strong association of several gut organisms with 13 different genetic locations in the mouse, with more still being discovered as the work progresses.

"It wasn't a big leap to think, 'you know, this hasn't really been looked at in food animals,'" Benson said. The new USDA grant will enable Benson and other scientists to do just that.

UNL scientists will do so in partnership with USDA's Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) at Clay Center and Geneseek, a private, Lincoln-based company that specializes in genotyping.

"It's really a Nebraska-centric project," Benson said, noting that all of the important pieces to the research exist in the state. The goal is to try to associate organisms in the cattle's gastrointestinal tract with genes in the animals to see if some of those interactions are causing certain animals to become supershedders of the E. coli pathogen, while others that may have E. coli present do not shed it in unusual numbers.

If those relationships can be understood, it may be possible to develop breeding and genetic programs to reduce the number of animals that shed high levels of E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and other pathogens.

"While epidemiologically oriented approaches have provided extensive information about the transmission patterns of the organism, they have essentially failed to come up with meaningful and effective preharvest interventions that work in beef production," Benson said. "On the other hand, breeding strategies, which have heretofore never been considered as an approach, could be implemented as a relatively simple intervention with potentially huge payoffs, ultimately reducing numbers of 'supershedders' that are released into feeding operations."

Benson said producers would be eager for such a breakthrough. "Many producers are already using sophisticated approaches to manage their breeding programs. For them, it would be yet another gene and another trait on their list of things that [they] want to breed for or breed against," he said.

MARC will provide about 1,500 animals for the research, and its bovine gene-mapping group, including Larry Keuhn and Warren Snelling, will be involved, as will USDA microbiologists Jim Wells and Jim Bono. Geneseek will handle the genotypic studies.

UNL's Gut Function Initiative and Core for Applied Genomics and Ecology also will be involved in the research. Benson said the MARC-UNL partnership was "greatly facilitated" by John Pollak, director of MARC, and Rolando Flores, head of UNL's Department of Food Science and Technology.

The USDA grant was part of the Food Safety Foundational Awards from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

— Release by UNL IANR News Service.

— Compiled by Linda Robbins, assistant editor, Angus Productions Inc.