Ruminating with RealAg – RealAgriculture

There have been many memes created around the adventure that working cattle with family members can hold. Whether that's husband and wife, or kids with their parents, the things said while working cattle are often things that cannot be spoken outside of the corral. This was Dylan Biggs' experience growing up working cattle with his... Read More

The day-to-day on a family ranch often means juggling many pieces in order to get the job done and raise the chances of making a profit. The Luthi Ranch, a 6th-generation family enterprise in western Wyoming, is no exception. On this episode of Ruminating with RealAg, Bryan Luthi joins host Amber Bell to discuss the... Read More

Access to high quality feed and water make for a good ranching location. They allow producers to raise productive livestock, setting up the ranch to turn a profit. Those same things are attractive to wildlife as well, and whether it is an ungulate, such as a deer or moose, or the predators that follow them,... Read More

Manure has been used as fertilizer for a very long time; however, with the advent of fewer mixed farms and access to commercial fertilizer, which is easier to transport and often easier to apply, nearly all farmers have moved away from using manure as the primary source of fertilizer on their operations. That being said,... Read More

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:...

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is widely used in research today. In medicine, NIR assists in non-invasive assessments of the brain, blood glucose levels and oxygen concentration in muscles. For agriculture, NIR is largely used in determining the quality of feedstuffs, as it's quick and relatively inexpensive. Related: NIR Workshop Offers Beef Producers Another Way to Improve... Read More

In this episode of Ruminating with RealAg, I speak to Brad Johnson, a professor and chair in meat and muscle biology at Texas Tech University. Johnson has been heavily involved in research around steroidal implants and beta adrenergic agonists, and attended the Saskatchewan Beef Industry Conference in January as a speaker. The conversation starts off... Read More

The role of genomics in the cattle industry continues to expand, as the price for genetic tests become more affordable for a wider demographic of producers. Parentage testing is only the tip of the iceberg available to interested parties, with understanding of expected progeny differences (EPD) and estimated breeding values (EBV) increasing and playing an... Read More

As evolution should dictate, there are substantial benefits to social behaviour in animals, provided that behaviour increases their fitness (or likelihood to reproduce). We see unique social behaviour in many species, including ourselves and our bovine counterparts. In cattle, social behaviours range from grooming to bonding, and witnessed accounts of cows protecting their young and... Read More

It’s calving season. You waited – we've delivered! Our second podcast is up and available for download! This podcast features an interview with Travis Peardon, a livestock specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, about how last year's harsh winter is still affecting ranch management. The rest of the podcast is a blur of activity,... Read More

If you asked me a year ago today what I was up to for the winter, I would have grinned and said, "feeding cows." A few months in, and I may not have been grinning much, save for one thing: podcasts. (sorry AM/FM radio stations, our rural tractors don't come with 30' antennas) Long, cold... Read More