Category: Ruminating with RealAg

How often is it said that farming is a lifestyle? Sometimes it is a hard one, it's sometimes frustrating, but often also rewarding in more ways than just money. While it is a lifestyle, farms and ranches are also businesses with high-stakes financial decisions required on a regular basis. With cattle prices hitting record highs,... Read More

Cover crops are all the not-quite-so-new rage and the process of integrating them into current agricultural systems has been gaining ground (pun intended). Seeding multiple species in a field can do some fantastic things for the land, such as enhance water holding capacity, improve soil biodiversity, provide added resistance to pests and disease, and improve... Read More

Although ranching comes with a whole host of risks, vaccinations have the potential to lower that risk substantially. While vaccines may not save every cow in a herd from disease, it does give producers the chance to protect the majority of the herd from several diseases that cause sickness and even death. In this Ruminating... Read More

Words such as planned, rotational, management intensive and adaptive multi-paddock have all been used to describe grazing methods that mimic the movement of wildlife that would have grazed the Prairies many years ago. Some of these are also words that Kelly Sidoryk uses to describe her family's grazing strategies. Sidoryk and her family had initially... Read More

With many cattle producers trying to cut costs, increase the productivity of their land, and have a tiny bit of a personal life, the idea of "out-wintering" has become a little more attractive in comparison to chilly daily feedings of corralled animals. While ranchers have looked at options such as bale grazing, swath grazing, or... Read More

There are many things that are outside of a producer's control when raising cattle. Rain, or lack of it, market prices, and predators can make farming livestock a risky business. Then there is the risk of having cows that do not birth easily, have low immunity, or do not process feed efficiently. While the first... Read More

There's no doubt that having a vaccination protocol on hand could save booster misses, bring all farm employees to the same page and improve overall confidence in our herd health programs. But, developing that protocol can be more than a little overwhelming. At the 2015 UCVM Beef Cattle Conference, I (finally!) tracked down Cody Creelman,... Read More

The Western Livestock Price Insurance Program’s (WLPIP) calf coverage deadline is May 28, 2015. WLPIP is a risk management program, allowing producers to pay a premium for forward price coverage. Should market price fall below their coverage level for their time frame, the producer will receive a payment. It all sounds pretty straightforward, but deciding... Read More

When you have livestock, you have scouring stock. Or, at least that’s how it seems some years, when any spare time you thought you might have is spent mixing, smelling and tubing warm electrolytes. In this episode of Ruminating with RealAg (the podcast), we hear about calf scours from Cody Creelman, a large animal veterinarian... Read More

This Ruminating with RealAg podcast takes us back to the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference in Saskatoon, where we hear from Suzanne Bertrand, deputy director general at the International Livestock Research Institute, on the differences between Canadian and African adoption of genomics technology, and how genetically modified cattle could combat African Sleeping Sickness. Related: Julie Borlaug... Read More