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Standing The Test Of Time - Professional Advice On How To Think Like A Successful Rancher Should

Cattle producers in today’s industry must be able to look ahead and be forward thinking when it comes to planning for and navigating through whatever the future may hold. Producers often invest in genetics for their herd that will probably not pay off for several years. However, according to Dr. Clay Mathis, director of the King Ranch Institute for Ranch Management, to be success over the next 20 years, ranchers will have to adopt the right mindset.

He told Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays during the recent Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers convention in San Antonio recently, no one really knows where this industry is headed.

“There’s so many external factors we don’t know,” he said. “The key point is, it’s the same mindset that the people that were successful 20 years ago, and are still successful today - that same mindset - that’s going to make producers successful 20 years from now.”

Mathis says it is all in the way you alter your production system when there is opportunity, and how you manage risk that will determine how successful your operation with weather over the course of time.

“I think it’s keeping a big picture perspective,” he said describing this mode of thinking. “It’s not just about working harder - everybody putting in another 30 minutes or an hour a day on the work crew. It’s about making those decisions that have big leverage across the operation.”

Mathis notes, too, that each operation has its own goals. He advises producers to figure out what theirs’ are, and set out in pursuit of them, keeping the end-result in mind at all times.

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US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”