Lyme disease - It's a scary thing! Here's a cautionary tale from the Grass Whisperer about his tick encounter, along with information about how ticks manage to dig themselves in, and how quickly you need to remove ticks to reduce your chances of getting diseases from them. You'll also find out if it works to trade grazing information to cover your tick health care costs.
If you've been thinking about direct marketing your beef, here's a great resource written by an Arizona rancher that will give you what you need to get started.
This is the final excerpt in this series. Authors Whit Hibbard and Dr. Lynn Locatelli conclude that investing in training for anyone handling and moving livestock is cheaper and more effective in the long run than trying to create and install expensive handling equipment that doesn't necessarily do the job.
Victor Shelton of the NRCS in Indiana puts out a monthly newsletter called "Grazing Bites." In the June issue he talks about what we can do to stay ahead of our forage when it's growing rapidly in the early grazing season.
In a recent Opinion piece in the New YorkTimes (Pastoral Icon or Wooly Menace), author Richard Conniff describes British environmentalist George Monbiot's problem with...
We all need a place to call home. Here's how students and faculty from Auburn's "Rural Studio" program are creating new ways to make homes affordable for everyone.
Home Grown Cow is America’s first and only national online farmers’ market for meat, poultry, and cheese offering local pick-up or door-to-door delivery. Farmers list and price their products themselves. Customers shop for what they like, place an order, and Home Grown Cow takes care of the delivery.
So you got that soils report and you're trying to figure out what you need to do to make your soils work better for your forages. Lime helps release calcium for use by plants, but there are times when you shouldn't use it.
You don't need to spend your hard earned cash on fancy facilities. Here Whit Hibbard and Dr. Lynn Locatelli continue their analysis highlighting why inexpensive, easy to use BudBoxes make more sense than high dollar facilities.
While substitutes can be found for many finite natural resources mined from the Earth—copper in phone lines can be replaced by fiber optics, steel in car bodies by composite plastics, and petroleum in transportation fuels by biodiesel or hydrogen cells—this is not the case for phosphorus in food production. The U.S. Geological Survey lists the following under the heading Substitutes for Phosphate Rock: “THERE ARE NO SUBSTITUTES FOR PHOSPHORUS . . . ”
In Part 4 of their analysis, Whit Hibbard and Dr. Lynn Locattelli describe how these kinds of facilities respond better to animal behavior than those suggested by Dr. Temple Grandin, and why they make your life as a livestock handler easier.
Is your spring late or early? Does it seem like some forages aren't springing up like you wish they would? Victor Shelton shares some background on "Growing Degree Days" and their impact on photosynthesis and plant growth.
