Looking back at long-term weather patterns isn’t for the faint of heart. Indeed, wet and dry cycles have been happening regularly for thousands of years. That, however, is little consolation for cattlemen scratching their collective heads as they try to manage their way through this current drought....More

If there are two words to describe the current environment that cattlemen find themselves in, they are volatility and uncertainty. Much of that is driven by historically low interest rates and high input prices. Navigating such an environment will mean you will need to work more closely with your ag lender than ever before....More

Sustainability has become a cultural buzzword of late. The trouble is that just about everyone has a different definition of it. To clear the air, and position the beef industry as a leader in the sustainability movement, the beef checkoff is conducting the first-ever, comprehensive, farm-to-fork life cycle analysis of beef....More

The 70-year-old Padlock Ranch sprawls across nearly 500,000 acres in Wyoming and Montana. After losing 80,000 acres of rangeland to wildfire last year, and suffering from ongoing drought, an optimistic Trey Patterson, Padlock’s chief operations officer, says the outfit has the tools to deal with the challenges built into its production plan....More

Last week, we looked at how creative destruction can help you look at your ranch from a different perspective. This week, we explore how a systems approach to managing the ranch can help you manage the operation as a whole, rather than as separate pieces....More

The future, it’s been said, ain’t what it used to be. While the future never has been very predictable for ranchers, changes in industry structure and dynamics over the past several years have made the future more and more uncertain. Running a ranch in this new era may well mean stepping beyond your comfort zone. In part one of a two-part series, we look at how creative destruction can help put you on a path of strategic planning that will prepare your operation for the future....More

A decade’s worth of data from the Superior Livestock Video Market sales indicate how value-added management and documentation of feeder cattle translates into more dollars at sale....More