This grazing season, don’t end up with dead or seizing cows in your pasture. Do all you can to prevent prussic acid poisoning in your herd.

Renting, leasing or purchasing grassland is often a complicated and expensive proposition. While many options are available, not all are practical or realistic.

Instead of the dairy farmer focusing on growing, harvesting and feeding rations, the focus changes to growing and managing pastures and controlling the cows’ utilization of those pastures with the goal to optimize cow nutrition, pasture quality, pasture yield and overall soil health.

Encouraging animals to disperse and utilize the full range can be a pain this time of year, but necessary for the health of the range plants. 

Mediation of grazing permit cases is a relatively new utilization of the mediation process provided by the USDA farm bill. Its utilization can be and should be one that provides non-adversarial solutions to key issues between the USFS and livestock producers in Idaho for the mutual benefit of both.

Herd rebuilding or expansion must start with enabling grazing land to support the additional animals over the long term.

Milk production per cow will be somewhat decreased on pasture when compared to feeding in confinement. Per cow costs of milk production also decrease when dairy farms turn to managed rotational grazing and maximize cow numbers per acre.

Nebraska producers Brock and Heidi Terrell and University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL) extension educator Mary Drewnoski helped address whether strip grazing is worth the additional time and labor when utilizing cover crops in the fall season.

2022 was a challenging year regarding precipitation throughout much of the Central and Western portions of the U.S. Many major cow-calf production regions, particularly in the central and southern Plains, are continuing to experience drought.