Farm Help

Healthy pasturelands provide livestock products, flood protection, wildlife habitat, purification of air and carbon sequestration. These lands also provide aesthetic value, open space and vital links in the enhancement of rural social stability and economic vigor.

What is the cost-share program?
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ Soil and Water Conservation Districts Commission has developed this program to provide financial incentives to help farmers control soil erosion on their land.

The following programs are available through the United States Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency.

Extension in the United States
The Cooperative Extension System is a nationwide, non-credit educational network. Each U.S. state and territory has a state office at its land-grant university and a network of local or regional offices. These offices are staffed by one or more experts who provide useful, practical and research-based information to agricultural producers, small business owners, youth, consumers and others in rural areas and communities of all sizes.(1)

In the late 70s and early 80s, Mike McClintock, agriculture specialist for Boone County, Ark., with the University of Arkansas Extension, was the assistant ranch manager at Louisiana State University. Part of McClintock’s duties as ranch manager was to demonstrate to an animal science class the concept of shrinkage in cattle. “We’d talk about shrinkage in the classroom, then we would go out and weigh 10 head of calves at random, and then I, or some of my hired men, would load those calves in a trailer and haul them around for three hours. After those three hours of haul time, in the fall Louisiana temperatures of I’d guess an 80-degree day or so, those calves would almost always have lost right at 6 percent of their body weight. That’s huge.”

Each year the Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association sponsors a tour of varied venues that are of interest to cattlemen. This year the tour ventured across northern Texas and back through Oklahoma. This year 55 people gathered for the five-day learning experience.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers several programs to help landowners address natural resource concerns related to pasture management. NRCS grassland specialists and conservation planners work with farmers on resource assessments of pastures to help design effective grazing systems. All owners and managers of private grazing land are eligible to receive technical assistance from NRCS.

It was a tough summer for Southern Plains livestock producers, many of whom were faced with a problem that had no solution. The historic drought left pastures barren and forage supplies scarce.

Producers must keep track of their costs. This was the shared sentiment between Logan Wallace, livestock specialist with the University of Missouri Extension and Brian See, agriculture agent with the University of Arkansas.

An early November announcement by the Japanese government could be good news for a lot of U.S. cattle producers… but bad news for a few.