Keeping Your Cattle Healthy Is Vital to Your Ranch

Nothing can be more devastating to a herd of cattle like a virus that spreads quickly. Cattle are not especially immune to sickness and trying to cure the sickness as it roars through the herd can be costly and disastrous when it comes to breeding in the future. The illnesses may result in the ultimate death of the cattle, so precautions must be taken long before things get out of hand.

Proper vaccinations are vital when it comes to preventing illnesses before they cause a major problem. The costs of the vaccinations can be steep but it is worth it in the long run because those cattle, if raised properly, can bring in a load of money and make the precautions worth every cent. If your cattle are not properly vaccinated it can wipe out the entire herd. Organic ranchers make sure that their cattle are properly vaccinated and that is why their cattle go for a much higher price when it comes to the bottom line. They have a higher mortality rate and need to sell for a much higher rate than regular commercial cattle so that the beef cattle ranchers can make their money back.

The United States government has placed many guidelines to regulate viruses in the cattle ranching industry and they have got to be followed. That is why there are so many regulations that need to be followed about importing cattle. There are feeding controls in place and the guidelines ensure that the cattle are well cared for and that the people who ultimately consume them are not at risk.

Make sure you have an emergency plan of action just in case there are illnesses among your cattle. They should immediately be separated from the healthy cattle and all should be examined to determine the healthy and the sick. Isolating the ill cattle is important and, remember, with some types of viruses there is an incubation period, so some cattle might not immediately appear ill, so that is why it is vital to monitor all cattle at the slightest sign of illness.

Beef cattle ranching is a vital part of the country since so many people eat red meat. Most of the red meat comes from cattle, so keeping your cattle healthy and safe from the rest of the herd is vital to your business and to the health of all beef-eating people, as well as the rest of your herd. Taking care of your herd is a big responsibility to your business as well as to those who enjoy your product.

Jeff Berlinicke

Cattle Bulls

If you want your bulls to produce at their best, make sure to keep them away from older and more experienced bulls during the mating season so that they can produce the things that are needed to be prepared and a quality diet is vital to the process. Keeping them close to older bulls can cause damage and will keep them from growing at a steady rate instead of maturing more quickly than normal. It is vital to keep an eye on the steadiness of the growth of a young bull.

The diet of a young bull is very important. Grain is a vital part of their diet, so using the right grains can be one of the most important parts of the breeding process. Bulls need about two pounds of grain per day after they are weaned, and that diet should continue to be enforced until the bull reaches about 1,000 pounds. Monitoring the dgrowth and the diet is vital to the growth of the bulls and needs to be monitored on a daily basis.

There is plkenty of technology available to monitor the diet and growth of the young bulls. A large number of heifers can be impregnated by a small herd of bulls, so costs can be kept down and, in beef cattle ranching that is very important. The bottom line plays a big part of the success of a cattle ranch, Most experts agree that the overall quality of genetics from the bulls that are available are more important than having an inordinate number of bulls. It is about quality over quantity.

Keeping the bulls away from heifers when it is not breeding season is another vital part of the breeding process. They should be separated by pens with no chance of mingling with the heifers and it might even be a good idea to use an electric fence that gives off shocks if the bulls get to close to the pens that hold the heifers. Bulls are very powerful and very strong and must be kept away by whatever means are necessary.

Keeping the bulls healthy and monitored closely is the most important part to ensuring a healthy cattle stock and making sure you get the best quality beef in return. Regular checkups mean everything and giving

Understanding Cattle Means Understanding Their Stress

As if there wasn't already enough to do when in the cattle business, people are accepting more and more how badly it affects cattle when they become stressed. There is a whole list if issues that are stress related in cattle. Making life easier for cows is a way of saving money because these issues always cost some money. The stress will take a toll on the cattle and their health and growth. It can also take a toll on employees that become injured and equipment that gets damaged or wears out faster.

There are a few basic reasons why cows become stressed. Understanding a cows instinctual nature will help with knowing why they act the way they do and how to better deal with it. Being that a cow is an animal the most frightful and stressful thing to them would be a predator. Anything that makes them feel that they are in danger of a predator will get them worked up. If a person tries to herd the cattle by using what they interpret as stalking behavior then the cows will respond with their own avoidance methods or behaviors.

The natural way of a predator would be to walk a full circle around the herd, now if a person does this in a calm and slow manner it will then encourage the cattle to bunch together, which is good for moving them. It is when the cows are stressed beyond just being slightly anxious that there are problems. If the cows do become excited past the point of just uneasiness then they will need time to settle back down before another attempt is made to bunch or move them.

Because a cow will feel that there is a predator around when they are being bunched or moved, it is helpful to let them see who or what is doing the bunching. It is part of their natural instinct to want to see what is making them nervous. If they can see who or what it is, they will continue to move. When they can't see because what's bothering them is in their blind spot they will then turn and sometimes circle around to get a look. This can really slow things down when trying to get them going in a certain direction and can be remedied by moving through their blind spot regularly.

If a handler understands the idea that each time cattle get moved, they are learning something it helps with understanding why treating them a certain way is so crucial. There are tried and true methods that will get cattle used to being moved in certain directions, without undue stress.

 While these methods do usually take more time, the money that is saved has to be considered. When a cow is regularly handled well they will learn that they can live without worrying about being scared or stressed, and that makes life easier on everyone.

Herd Behavior and Moving Large Bunches of Cattle - Part 3

The whole secret to letting (not forcing) your cattle act as a herd is to use cattle instinct to your advantage rather than against you. If you get your motion going and keep it going from the back, you are working against yourself and not keeping the cattle as stress free as possible. Think about it for a second. Most of the time you are moving your cattle to fresh feed, so why should that be stressful to them? It should not, in fact your cattle (if they are being handled in a way they are relaxed in) should want to move for you. Keep in mind you will have to work at this and it will take several moves before they start moving for you with little or no effort. To keep them relaxed:

1. Do not push them from the back
2. Let a lead establish itself (and remember a lead is 1 or 2 head in the front, NOT 15 or 20 head abreast !!!)
3. Keep them loose – They will want to keep several feet to several yards between them while moving
4. Keep your motion going from the front to back.
5. If you have cattle wandering off in the wrong direction, try to approach them from the front. They will go by you and try to catch up to the other cattle (often at a trot or lope) without you having to “push” them.
6. Do not turn the cattle from back to front by riding between them and the fence. This only turns the back of the herd first, which slows the forward motion of the herd and ususally begins other problems. Turn the lead first and the rest of the herd will turn as they  approach you.

          The first couple of times you may have to ride hard to get them lined out as it is not established in them to follow one another (as we have spent their entire lives keeping them from doing so). Once they begin figuring it out you may have to go at a trot just to keep up with them and get them turned into the right gate. In the following video I picked these steers up in a 640 acre stubble field. They had been there for approximately three weeks, and all but five head were together (and those five head were only about 200 yards away). I had driven the cattle out the first gate and across a field to the fence along a county road. This video will show me turn the cattle off the road and leave as 723 steers go through the gate with no one and noting to turn them. This was the second gate of a six gate, three mile move I made with these steers and no help.

          These methods work especially well with pairs if you want to keep them paired throughout the move. A few years ago I was working on a large registered outfit. We were always moving pairs in groups of 350 or more. For some reason these guys were always wadding them from the back. Moves which should have taken a few hours would turn into a long day (or several days). One move was dreaded because the cattle would ball up at the bottom of a mountain and turn the wrong way and would not be paired. The funny thing about this was although there was a 10-foot gate right in the road they were trailed down, they wanted to turn the cattle left to take them through a 30-foot gate followed by another turn to the right. One day we gathered that pasture and I talked one of the guys at the bottom of the pasture into opening that narrow gate. I had a couple of interns with me who allowed the cattle to string out, and I just stayed at the front until about 50 yards from the gate, and let them go. The cattle ran through the gate with calves at side, through three more gates and into the trap where we wanted them. A few calves missed the gate, bawled and their mothers came back for them. Needless to say the guy who had argued about them not going through the gate thought it was “lucky” and had nothing to do with letting them string out.

          I want to mention one other thing that causes a lot of stress here. It is something nearly everyone does from time to time to make things easier, but that causes a lot of stress. That is farmering down and leading your cattle with a feed wagon.  Cattle have their own pecking order. When you stop in the middle of a pasture with a load of feed the same cattle are there at the truck every day and the same cattle are always out on the fringes. Alphas first on feed and the lower down the pecking order, the longer they have to wait to get on feed. When you start moving cattle with feed, they will line up in the same way. The cattle next to the load will be trying to nibble as they go. The ones on the back are waiting to get to feed. It would be like going to a restaurant and fighting with a bunch of NFL linebackers to see who gets to eat first (and adding to the frustration by having your prime rib moving away from you just fast enough that you can’t get to it) After awhile you lose interest and go to some fast food joint.

          This scenario is even more stressful if you are moving pairs.  The calves will automatically drop to the back rather than fight for feed with the cows. They lose track of their mothers, want to go back to where they came from and the wreck is on. Just let them move out, keep your motion going from front to back with the cattle going past you and you will never have problems moving your pairs, no matter how young they are. With yearling cattle,  this method will instill the instinct for the cattle to follow one another.  Once the cattle get the idea  one person can move some pretty  large groups of cattle. I regularly move from 300 to more than 700 head of steers  with only a deaf dog for help and few problems (Anyone who claims to never have a problem probably never does anything.)

http://www.2lazy4u.us/herdbehav.html 

Animal Production and Marketing Issues: Retail Meat Prices and Price Spreads

Price Spreads

ERS develops price spreads for beef, pork, broilers, turkey, and eggs as a measure that describes the allocation of the consumer dollar among the various stages of marketing in the livestock/meat industry. The measuring points are the farm, wholesale, and retail levels in the marketing chain. The farm and wholesale prices are from USDA's Market News, and retail prices are from BLS. Prices from these sources are standardized to reflect 1 pound of meat at the retail level. Meat Price Spreads are reported monthly for total (farm to retail), farm to wholesale, and wholesale to retail.
Beef values and price spreads measure the value of a Choice steer at the farm, to the packer, and when sold through grocery stores. Pork values and price spreads measure the value of a slaughter hog at the farm, to the packer, and when sold through grocery stores. Both tables show values for the current month, the previous 12 months, the last 12 quarters, and the last 6 years. A historical series contains many more years of data on price spreads for beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and eggs.
Price spreads can be volatile and may reflect lags in price response at the farm and retail levels due to price changes. Lag lengths may vary depending upon whether prices are going up or down and depending upon expectations about future price changes.
Price spreads on a current-dollar (nominal) basis show long-term increases over time. Marketing expenses reflect costs of labor, utilities, facilities, and non-livestock materials such as packaging. The cost of these items tends to follow inflation. After accounting for inflation by deflating beef and pork price spreads by the Consumer Price Index, deflated price spreads do not show much of a trend over the long term. Some studies suggest that economies of size gained in meat packing have been passed back to the farm, thereby raising livestock prices above what they would otherwise have been absent of consolidation.
More information on price spreads can be found in U.S. Beef Industry: Cattle Cycles, Price Spreads, and Packer Concentration (April 1999); in the Agricultural Outlook article, Controversies in Livestock Pricing December 2002); and in Beef and Pork Values and Price Spreads Explained (May 2004).

 http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/AnimalProducts/PriceReporting.htm

Animal Production and Marketing Issues: Retail Meat Prices and Price Spreads

Retail Prices

In 2002, ERS began providing monthly average retail price data for selected cuts and aggregate categories of beef, pork, poultry, lamb, and veal, based on electronic supermarket scanner data. The database contains meat-cut categories that correspond to BLS meat-cut categories and provide an alternative way to estimate retail prices. (This alternative process was mandated by Congress in the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999.) Along with the BLS categories, the ERS database includes price data on additional cuts, information on volume sold, and the discount effects of featuring. (An April 2003 Amber Waves data feature contains a few examples on how meat prices respond to featuring and season.) For more information and the data, see Retail Scanner Prices for Meat, which is housed at Colorado State University's Livestock Market Information Center (LMIC) as of October 2004. The pilot program between ERS and LMIC has monthly data running from January 2001 until April 2008.
BLS also publishes average retail prices for selected meat cuts. Scanner data standard table 1 presents average retail prices for selected meat cuts from both BLS and the supermarket scanner data. BLS collects prices from a larger number and greater variety of outlets, but they do not collect data on sales volume. Comparing Two Sources of Retail Meat Price Data (November 2009) compares BLS and scanner data, describing the differences between these two data sets and evaluating their relative strengths and weaknesses.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/AnimalProducts/PriceReporting.htm

Cattle: Inventory on January 1 by Year, US