Livestock
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If you follow national climate news, you have probably seen a lot of splashy information on the 5th National Climate Assessment, which was released Tuesday morning to a lot of acclaim and a huge roll-out of information about the changing climate in the United States. I was one of the authors of the Southeast chapter,…
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In the past few weeks I’ve been getting phone calls from cattle producers in NW Georgia and NE Alabama to complain about the Drought Monitor depiction in their area. Many of these counties have not seen much if any rain in weeks, and with the higher than normal temperatures we are experiencing, their soils are…
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Surveyors continue to assess damage from Hurricane Idalia in Florida and other states. Damage to agriculture is now estimated at $447 million and to Florida forests at almost $65 million. You can see images and read more at the links below. Growing Produce: What’s the Damage? Hurricane Idalia Toll on Florida Ag Upwards of $447…
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Fast Company has an interesting story about cows in Puerto Rico that have a natural mutation that allows the cattle to thrive in hotter conditions than other conventional varieties of cattle. This might allow producers to grow cattle in areas that in the future will be too hot for cattle to do well. The mutation…
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As the temperature rises with this week’s heat wave, humans and animals both experience discomfort and potential harm from heat stress and other heat diseases. For livestock like cattle, the heat makes them less likely to want to eat, reducing weight gain and milk production. Prolonged periods of heat can reduce fertility in cows, further…
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While a lot of the hype on social media this week (at least among meteorologists) has been the potential for snow somewhere in the Southeast or on the East Coast, the bigger story for most of us is going to be the coming cold weather, according to James Spann, well-known Birmingham meteorologist. The conditions he…
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The string of weather-related disasters that has hit the United States this year has caused a lot of problems for farmers across the country, leading to big decreases in the yield of citrus and rice as well as the culling of cattle due to drought. Here are a couple of articles that described some of…