News Update
December 20, 2016
Fingertip Marketing
It all began in 2010 as a Christmas gift for their dad, Blaine Bruner.
Blaine’s children — son Travis and wife Ashley, son Trenton and wife Rachel, and son Ty — wanted to help the family’s Drake, N.D., ranching business expand its customer base. They browsed the Internet and found other ranches that already had websites. They didn’t want their operation to fall behind.
The Bruners reached out to Angus Media for assistance in developing a site of their own.
“To get started, we shared our ideas for colors, design and layout, provided some examples of websites that we liked and didn’t like so they could see the style we were looking for,” Ashley Bruner says. “[Angus Media] then put it all together. We made tweaks, and then went live with it.”
Still, when Christmas rolled around, the Bruner children weren’t sure what Blaine would think. “We got it all set up and wrapped up a laptop that was set to the website we had designed,” Ashley says. “When he opened it up, the site was right there.”
Continue reading this Angus Journal feature story online.
Snippets on Sustainability
As the beef industry continues discussion on how best to define sustainability and convey our efforts to consumers, I’ve had some interesting firsthand observations with how other industries are addressing this issue.
My first experience came in February 2016, while attending an evening of wine tasting in Spearfish, S.D., just 20 miles from my home. It was a small event for about 20 people hosted by a wine distributor. Half a dozen wines from three different California- and Washington-based wineries were featured. What was most interesting to me was that the theme for the evening focused on the fact each of the wineries had been operating as “family businesses” for multiple generations — and thus the distributor was promoting their “sustainability.”
I instantly thought of the parallel to multi-generational farms and ranches.
Read more in the complete Angus Journal feature story.
Employing UAVs to Improve Wheat Breeding
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has awarded $975,000 to Kansas State University (K-State) for work that incorporates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the process of breeding better wheat varieties.
The university’s work is designed to give scientists deeper understanding of in-field conditions so they can improve breeding programs in the United States and internationally.
UAVs, more commonly known as drones, are quickly becoming recognized as a valuable tool for mapping agricultural crops. K-State has been developing uses of UAVs to collect data on thousands of plots, including work in Kansas, Mexico and India.
“Perhaps the greatest bottleneck currently in plant breeding and genetics is effectively generating precision measurements of plant characteristics in the field,” said project director Jesse Poland, assistant professor of plant pathology and agronomy at K-State.
For more information, view the K-State news release.
Tall Fescue Pasture Renovation Workshop
Anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time around livestock or forages knows tall fescue is a double-edged sword. University of Kentucky (UK) forage specialists are teaming up with the Alliance for Grassland Renewal to host a workshop to teach producers how to renovate their old tall fescue pastures with a novel endophyte variety.
The Tall Fescue Renovation Workshop will take place March 9 at UK’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and UK Spindletop Research Farm.
Producers have widely used tall fescue in pastures for decades, because it survives well under many conditions including drought, cold, overgrazing, insects and diseases. However, the most common variety, KY-31, also contains toxins that can severely affect cattle and horse performance.
During the workshop, participants will hear from UK specialists, as well as those from the USDA’s Forage-Animal Production Research Unit, University of Missouri, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Missouri Forage and Grassland Council’s Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative, producers and industry representatives.
For more information, visit the Angus Journal Virtual Library calendar of upcoming events.
Winter Wheat Meeting Jan. 5
Kentucky wheat growers can get a comprehensive overview of the UK’s new and ongoing research at the 2017 Winter Wheat Meeting. The annual meeting, hosted by the UK College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, will be from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. CST Jan. 5 at the James E. Bruce Convention Center in Hopkinsville.
Specialists from UK’s Wheat Science Group and the University of Tennessee will lead discussions on weed problems, 2017 crop condition, stripe rust and fusarium head blight management, economic tools to improve decision making, growing barley and rye in Kentucky, maximizing Kentucky’s wheat and double-crop soybean system, a warm fall’s influence on pests, and market outlook, profitability potential, and risk management alternatives. Kentucky growers can expect to hear from some familiar UK faces, as well as new specialists, who will present at this meeting for the first time.
For more information, visit the Angus Journal Virtual Library calendar of upcoming events.
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