News Update
November 20, 2012
Small Changes, Big Returns
Change doesn’t have to be dramatic and sweeping to make an impact.
Bill Rishel, a registered Angus breeder from North Platte, Neb., says little gains in efficiency, functionality and carcass merit all add up.
For easy math, he uses a 100-head example.
“As a cow-calf producer, the No. 1 traits for profitability are fertility, reproduction and herd health,” he says.
If an average herd has 90 head survive to weaning, what would five more mean?
“Five additional head, because you had a little more fertility, you had a little better health or management — that’s about a $3,000 bump,” Rishel says.
Calving ease is one easy place to make that gain. “Years ago the only tool we had was phenotype,” he says.
“Today, when you add the genomics into the EPDs (expected progeny differences), we’re a lot further along than ever before in my life.”
Tools are available to pick the right sires and drive improvements in other areas, he says.
Those 95 calves move on to the industry average 205-day weaning, at 2.5 pounds (lb.) of weight per day of age (WDA). At just over $1.48 per hundredweight (cwt.), that’s $757.
What if they gained more?
“That 5% increase, along with the five more calves — now you’re talking about some really big money,” Rishel says.
Such a percentage gain in weaning weights means WDA moves from 2.5 to 2.63 lb. That may not seem like much, he says, but figuring in all multipliers moves total calf price to more than $797, and $7,585 to the herd’s bottom line.
For more information and the full release, click here.
New AFBFA Curriculum: Feeding Minds, Cultivating Growth
The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) is celebrating the release of Feeding Minds — Cultivating Growth, the latest educator resource to be developed by the AFBFA. The guide and accompanying books can be purchased online starting early next week at www.agfoundation.org.
Feeding Minds — Cultivating Growth teaches young people to care for others, build healthy relationships and learn from their elders while living vicariously through the narratives of young farmers and ranchers. The educator’s guide supports classroom reading of one or more of the following Farm Bureau-designated accurate ag books: The Beef Princess of Practical County by Michelle Houts, Heart of a Shepherd by Rosanne Perry, and Little Joe by Sandra Neil Wallace.
The educator’s guide is a turn-key resource for middle-school teachers, including standards-based lesson plans, take-home enrichment activities, supporting handouts, summarizing information about each text, a suggested implementation plan, and a scoring rubric for a final project.
Thanks to a generous donation by Random House Inc., the AFBFA is giving away 15 class sets of books and educator’s guides this fall. Interested middle school educators are encouraged to contact their state Farm Bureau Agricultural Literacy Coordinator. Coordinators may submit one school nomination per state. Recipients will be selected on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Truxton Farmer to Speak on Skip-row Planting
at Missouri Livestock Symposium, Dec. 7-8
Montgomery County farmer Harry Cope will talk about how he “moves the feedlot from the barn to the field” at the Missouri Livestock Symposium Dec. 7-8 at Kirksville Middle School. University of Missouri Extension sponsors the free event.
Cope received a USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Farmer/Rancher grant to research skip-row planting techniques with cover crops for sustainable growing. He has been experimenting with interplanting soybeans with corn to provide feed for his cattle and sheep operation on his Missouri Century Farm in Truxton. The crop is not harvested, and livestock are taken to the field to graze.
Cope staggers four rows of corn with two rows of long-season soybeans with a six-row planter. The bean pods provide mineral balance to the high-protein corn for his cattle and sheep. “We want to grow as much energy as we can,” he said.
By not harvesting the crop, Cope saves money. Taking the cows to the feed, rather than the feed to the cows, eliminates costs such as grinding, storage, transportation and manure management. “It lets us stop our cost of production at planting,” he said.
For more information and the full release, click here.
National Beef Quality Audit Reveals Trends
in Beef Production, Industry
Continued expansion of branded beef programs and cattle herds with black hides are several trends identified in the 2011 National Beef Quality Audit, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Research meat scientist.
Jeff Savell, one of the audit’s principal investigators and holder of the Manny Rosenthal chair in the Department of Animal Science at Texas A&M University, provided an overview of the audit’s findings before faculty members recently.
Savell said the audit revealed cattle with predominantly black hide color increased from 45.1% to 61.1% since the 2000 audit. There was also a significant reduction in the amount of mud and manure on hides, he said, as the industry has maximized cattle cleanliness to reduce the threat of potential contaminants coming into plants.
Branded-beef programs continue to increase.
“There are 6.4 programs per processing plant,” Savell said, as plants have also modified the way they sort cattle as a result of these branded beef programs.
“What used to be pretty common was to bring cattle in, harvest them, and then sort them after they had been chilled and graded some 36 to 48 hours later,” he said. “Now they are doing a lot of pre-sorting for age and source and various branded-beef programs, and have specialized days of harvest for them due to the respective requirements by these programs.”
For more information and the full release, click here.
Extension Provides Food Safety Modules
for Foodservice Employees
Foodservice employees have many things to think about while on the job. To help them continue to put safe food knowledge into practice, Iowa State University (ISU) Extension and Outreach recently launched a research and training development project called Do Your PART.
The USDA has estimated that about half of every food dollar is spent for food prepared away from home. The retail foodservice operations that prepare this food could include four generations of employees working together, according to Catherine Strohbehn, member of the SafeFood© project team and ISU adjunct professor and extension specialist. Because of variations in background, each generational worker may have different motivations toward work and identify different barriers to performing work safely. In addition, each generation may have different technology capabilities and learning styles.
Do Your PART is funded by a USDA Customization Grant led by Susan Arendt, an associate professor in hospitality management, and also includes Strohbehn; Ana Correia from curriculum and instruction; Mack Shelley from statistics and political science; Janell Meyer, project coordinator; and two graduate student team members. The group developed the Do Your PART modules to relay effective strategies to workers of all generations using short, visual units of information.
“It is recognized that there are differences among generations of workers,” Strohbehn said. “There is also a very high number of workers in the restaurant industry who speak another language at home. We made the messages in the video modules easy to understand and act upon.”
For more information and the full release, click here.
Drought Impact on Crop Yields Topic
at MU Crop Management Conference, Dec. 18-19
Grain farmers should use caution on how they apply recently released data on crop productivity related to drought, said University of Missouri (MU) Extension agronomy specialist Bill Wiebold. “Don’t make drastic changes in your operation based upon one year’s experience,” he warns.
Wiebold will speak on crop management techniques that may add stability to corn and soybean yields in 2013 at the MU Crop Management Conference, Dec. 18-19 at the Holiday Inn Executive Center in Columbia, Mo.
Wiebold has published his analysis of USDA data in recent MU Integrated Pest Management publications (ipm.missouri.edu/ipcm). Crop productivity is a good indicator of drought intensity. “Drought severity, as calculated by corn yield loss, was greater in 2012 than for any year within the past 50 years,” he said.
Early data indicates that corn and soybean yields were well below trend lines. Final numbers from USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) likely won’t be available until early 2013.
Reports are coming in that Missouri soybean yields may be greater than USDA predictions of 28 bushels per acre in September, 28% below the trend line yield, Wiebold said. Higher numbers may be due to rains from Hurricane Isaac in late August. “It just shows how resilient soybeans are,” he said. Late-maturing varieties were helped more by Isaac than other varieties. Wiebold’s research shows the greatest soybean yield loss from drought came in 1983, 1984 and 2012.
For more information and the full release, click here.
Editor’s Note: The articles used within this site represent a mixture of copyrights. If you would like to reprint or repost an article, you must first request permission of Angus Productions Inc. (API) by contacting the editor at 816-383-5200; 3201 Frederick Ave., Saint Joseph, MO 64506. API claims copyright to this web site as presented. We welcome educational venues and cattlemen to link to this site as a service to their audience.