Cattle are typically marketed and transported several times in their lives. Marketing and transportation can be the most fatiguing and stressful events in a feeder calf’s life.
advertisement
breadcrumbs
Topics
Follow practical information for the beef producer on essential topics including management, reproduction and calving, new technology, facilities improvement, beef quality, and feed and nutrition.
LATEST
Pregchecking is an important tool to manage your herd efficiently. There are multiple ways to determine the pregnancy status of an animal: wait and see, palpate, draw blood and ultrasound. As in many facets of the cattle industry, there is not a one size fits all solution. Most of us are addressing the questions, “Am I feeding open cattle?” and, “How do I determine which are my most productive animals?”. Ultrasound technology helps answer these questions.
Becoming a good ultrasounder is all about reading the details amidst the shades of grey. Training your eye to know what “normal” is, will be quite helpful. If you learn what a standard or normal image looks like, you will be able to determine a variation. Ultrasounding takes some effort to learn. The natural progression is pregnant/open determination→fetal aging→fetal sexing and detailed ovarian exams. Confirming pregnancies is simple and can be learned quite quickly for most. Basic fetal aging is a natural progression shortly after pregnant/open status. Fetal sexing and advanced ovarian exams take a lot more time and number of cattle scanned to learn.
Well begun is half done. This old idiom could be restated, “A calf well started is half finished.” If done well, a receiving program sets cattle up for a successful closeout. However, if done poorly, it can set cattle back so there is no catching up.
“Foot-and-mouth disease [FMD] is going to be a bigger disaster when it comes to market disruption than what we faced with COVID-19,” said Danelle Bickett-Weddle, associate director for the Center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa State University.
One of the richest blessings a family business could have is a patriarch or matriarch (I’ll use patriarch for both roles for simplicity in this article) who has moved out of their day-to-day leadership role yet is still available to share their unique wisdom when the need occurs.
The beef industry’s resource
Progressive Cattle provides practical beef operation management articles, timely news, cutting-edge technology information and thought-provoking opinions to you at no cost.
advertisement
Cattle Poll
advertisement
advertisement
Blogs
