Livestock
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The New York Times posted an interesting article on the changing nature of droughts in Kenya and other parts of Africa. According to trends over the last thirty years, droughts are becoming more frequent and are getting worse. This is impacting livestock producers there, who are having a more difficult time feeding and maintaining their…
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The Douglasville (GA) Patch has an interesting article about using goats as landscape tenders this week. You might have heard of cities using goats to clean up unwanted weeds in difficult terrain. In this case, the US Army Corps of Engineers is using a herd of 16 goats, known as the “Chew Crew”, to maintain…
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Drought conditions in parts of the US are affecting the expansion of beef cattle herds due to lack of feed and adverse growing conditions, according to an article in AgWeb this week. Drought from last summer in the High Plains and continuing drought through fall and winter in the southwestern US, including Texas, have impacted…
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Drovers’ Newletter posted an interesting story today about the impacts of severe weather on forage quality and quantity. Flooding, drought, and high humidity all played a role in affecting forage production in 2017. This is a timely topic for me since I spoke today at a short course on forage and hay in Burke County,…
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Here is a nice article from Farm Journal’s PORK newsletter which discusses the impacts of weather on grains for swine feed. It includes a discussion of the effects of weather on planting, pollination and crop yield as well as storage and other factors. You can read it here.
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UF/IFAS announced that a new tool which cattle ranchers can use to determine appropriate hay and supplement needs for their cattle in winter is now available. The tool uses an spreadsheet approach with farmer inputs like animal weight, whether she is lactating, and the quality of the base hay to determine the correct supplements to…
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In trying to keep up with current climate science, I often run across articles that I think are interesting or challenging. Here are a few of the articles that have caught my eye in recent weeks. Cosmos magazine describes an counterintuitive impact of a warming climate at the end of the last Ice Age–a temporary…