This is the time of year that you should start to track the performance of your beef cow herd’s body condition as pastures mature and forage quality, as well as quantity, start to go down.

The Beef Cow Body Condition Score App is one of our apps that will help you track and manage the body condition of your herd. The BCS App is an app that you simply download, and then head to the pasture and take profile pictures of selected cows. If you are a novice to body condition scoring, you can compare them to reference photos of cows that represent Body Condition Scores from 1 to 9.

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The incessant rains have made for a wet summer for many cattle producers across the US. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, cattle have to stand in water resulting in more cases of foot rot. Why should you care? Lame cows won’t eat enough and thus won’t make enough milk for calves. Lame calves won’t graze either, resulting in further reduced weight gains. Lame bulls will not travel to seek out females in heat, meaning more open cows at the end of breeding season. Overall, lameness can be very costly in the long run.

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I was recently in Las Vegas for an event with a long time distributor of CRYSTALYX^® and valuable customer.  I’ve been to Las Vegas several times and it is a fun place.   Entertainment and gambling as we know is what makes money in Las Vegas.  I often hear stories from people who brag about how much money they make gambling, but they are only the lucky few.  If gambling paid for the gambler, Vegas wouldn’t have much to offer.

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July is here, and with it, some of the hottest days of the summer are just ahead of us.  Self-fed intake of CRYSTALYX^® Brand Supplements can be higher in the summer/warmer months.  During the manufacturing process, CRYSTALYX^® is packaged in to barrels at a temperature of approximately 150 to 175 degrees.  At this temperature, CRYSTALYX^® is very pliable, much like Play Doh^® or thick cookie dough.  As it cools, it becomes hard.  Hardness is a primary factor in determining the self-fed intake of CRYSTALYX^®.  As you would expect, if CRYSTALYX^® warms back up towards that 150 degree temperature, it will become softer again.  That is just the nature of a Low-Moisture Block.

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Picking back up on the topic of trace minerals and immune function (review the blog about zinc here and copper here), I’d like to continue the discussion, but focusing on selenium and vitamin E.

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For most spring calving herd producers, cows are out on pasture with their calves at side meeting their nutritional needs through grazing.  Little input is required other than a good fence and some supplemental vitamin/mineral nutrition.  Nutritionally it is a very significant time in the cow’s production cycle as they are at a critical point for maintaining a yearly calving interval.  The goal is to have cows bred within roughly 80 days of when they calved in order to maintain this yearly interval which can provide a uniform set of calves to merchandize in the fall or winter months.

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Tall fescue has long been associated with a syndrome known as Summer Slump (a.k.a. Fescue Foot or Fescue Toxicosis). An endophyte fungus within the fescue plant produces alkaloids that cause adverse symptoms including: decreased weight gains, weight loss, decreased feed intake, reduced milk production, higher body temperature, increased respiration rates, rough hair coat, unthrifty appearance, loss of blood flow to extremities, excessive salivation and poor reproductive performance. Symptoms seem to be worst during hot summer months. Table 1 illustrates the differences in weight gain in steers on both high- and low-endophyte fescue diets.

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Late in the summer of 2014, CRYSTALYX^® Brand Supplements came with a new launch, or better described, a new approach of product programs.  There really wasn’t any new product, except for one; rather a reformulation of a few and a “categorical” look at different programs.  We call this our Economy, Balanced and Premium categories.  There were a few blogs written in the latter half of 2014 that mentioned these product categories so I won’t elaborate on the details of each.

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