By Joel Salatin: As the new local, pastured, carbon-based food movements converge, consolidation and collaboration are in the air. The days of the single-family farm servicing 100-400 customers may be harder to maintain. A fascinating article debunks four basic assumptions in today’s business world...
By Dr. Anibal Pordomingo: Producer experiences show that marbling early is easier if we start with a good nutritional management of the cow during the last half of gestation and during the first four months after calving...
By Jim Gerrish: There has been a tremendous surge in the use of annual forages over the last several years. Part of this has been driven by the increased use of annual cover crops in mixed farming-livestock production systems. There has been a spillover of interest in putting annual forages into existing perennial pastures. I am pretty sure I have received more questions on that topic in the last two to three years than I had in the previous 20-30 years combined...
By Steve Kenyon: Did you know that a plant could grow without soil? In a crack in a rock on a mountainside, a spruce tree can grow. How does it grow and where does it get its nutrients?...
By Karl Dallefeld: Legumes are an important part of the diversity of any pasture or cover crop and they bring far more to the table than simply nitrogen credits...
By Heather Smith Thomas: Sims Cattle Company is a grass and cattle outfit run by Scott and April Sims and their son Shanon and his wife Melinda. Scott and Shanon are third and fourth generation, respectively, on this Wyoming ranch. Recently they have been making a lot of innovative changes in their operations. “We’d been taking our replacement heifers to Torrington, at lower elevation, putting them on silage to develop them through the winter, and then bring them back home for summer grazing. “We decided we’d try leaving the heifer calves on the cows for the winter, not weaning them until they are 10 months old...
By William Winter: About ten years ago, when grass-fed cattle producer and entrepreneur, Pride Sasser, of the rural mountainous area of North Carolina first brought heirloom pigs to his state, everyone thought, “Man, that’s like hauling coal to Newcastle!” ...
