Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
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Digest T Volume 53 • No. 9
Cruel, Cruel Skies by Lee Pitts
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“The basics to roping and dancin' are the same: a sense of rhythm, good timing and an eye for distance.” in the country that hasn’t bankrupted itself by living beyond its means. Still, Texas farmers and ranchers are suffering through the most severe one-year drought in their recorded history. Making matters worse, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicts that the La Niña weather pattern causing the dry skies will extend into 2012. Just how bad is it? Some parts of the state haven’t had any rain
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We know, it’s hard to feel sorry for Texans, after all, they get to live in Texas! They have Lone Star Beer, a thriving cowboy culture and it’s one of the few states
at all this year. Zero. Stock tanks and reservoirs have evaporated, crops have withered and cattle have died. You know it’s bad when all cattlemen and newspaper editors can talk about are “drouth survival strategies.” Here’s a clue as to how bad it is: in Miles, Texas, the town fathers decided to take the word “cotton” out of their annual Cotton Festival because they haven’t produced enough cotton this
year to pad a pillow. Ask anyone under the age of 60 in any West Texas coffee shop and they’ll tell you that it’s the worst drouth they’ve ever seen. Amarillo, has had a grand total of 2.7 inches of rain so far this year when they usually have 14. The Canadian River that used to stop cattle herds dead in their tracks, is bone dry in many places. Most West Texas towns experienced two months straight of 100 degree heat and in San Angelo it was three months. Towns that are reliant on surface water wonder where their next drink will come from. Texas A & M has calculated that there have been a record $5.2 billion in farm and ranch losses thus far, with ranchers absorbing $2.06 billion of that total. In 96 percent of the state, pasture and range conditions have been judged to be in “very poor” or “poor” condition, according to continued on page two
First all-vegan college cafeteria opens in Texas
The Worst That Ever Was
GREG HENDERSON, Editor, Associate Publisher, www.cattlenetwork.com, e-newsletters/drovers-daily/
tudents can no longer get a cheeseburger at Mean Greens, one of five on-campus cafeterias at The University of North Texas in Denton. That’s because UNT dining services has designated the cafeteria allvegan. Believed to be the first all-vegan cafeteria on an American campus, Mean Greens’ menu includes no animal products, like meat, milk or eggs. Instead, the fare features vegetarian soups, paninis and vegetarian sushi. The university’s dining services reports that so far, many of the students who eat there aren’t necessarily vegan, but just want to eat healthy. The all-vegan cafeteria is apparently in response to student demand for vegan foods. A 2004 survey of college students by food service provider Aramark showed that one in every four students surveyed wanted vegan meal options on college campuses. To many students, going vegan may seem far healthier than the typical college diet. But dietitians warn that meals missing animal fats
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by LEE PITTS
I’m No Hottie!
SEPTEMBER 15, 2011 • www. aaalivestock . com
ow would you like to be a Texas rancher these days? Amidst the best cattle market we’ve ever seen, with some calves selling for as much as a thousand dollars, Mother Nature has taken away their opportunity to participate. Oh, they’re selling cattle all right, in fact they’re selling the whole shebang: their cows and their hungry 300-pound babies who never would reach 500 pounds if they had to do it on the groceries Mother Nature has provided this year. And every empty cloud that wafts by just teases those who haven’t sold out yet to try and hang on a little longer. Gulf coast ranchers would even take a devastating hurricane at this stage of the game, if it promised to bring a little moisture. The drouth is so bad there’s been talk that Texas could lose its number one ranking for having the most cattle of any state in the nation, and we suppose that’s theoretically possible, if not for the fact that the number two state, Kansas, is suffering right along with Texas.
Riding Herd
aren’t necessarily more nutritious. “Just because they take something off the plate, what replaces it needs to be tasty and nutrient-rich,” Leslie Bonci, director of sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center told ABC News. Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also told ABC News, it makes sense that college students would want to explore new diets. “Lots of young people experiment,” he said. “They do it with booze, drugs . . . why not a new way of eating?” Inside Mean Greens students find an ambience that is modern, decorated with bold, contemporary graphics in shades of tangerine, lime green and red. Quotes from Gandhi and Einstein line the top of two walls. The cafeteria offers 20 dishes at lunch such as vegetables that are oven-roasted and then quickly seared on the griddle in full view of the diners. Dietitians encourage the students to choose continued on page four
he coldest I’ve ever been in my life was In Aberdeen, South Dakota, when the wind chill was minus 35 degrees. I can’t tell you what it felt like because I’d lost all feeling once we got into negative numbers. But I still preferred that to hot weather because you can always put on more clothes, but when it gets unbearably hot there’s only so much you can take off before breaking indecent exposure statutes. I’m touched that there have been so many good articles written this summer about how to care for the cows when it gets hot. But what about the cowboys? One article I read said that the comfort zone for cattle was between 41 and 77 degrees. This, of course, compares favorably with my personal comfort zone which ranges between 68 and 69 degrees. I admit I have no heat resistance, and you can call me a wimp, but be advised I know what it is to be hot. I’ve lived and worked in hot spots like Australia, New Mexico and the oilfields of Torrey Canyon where the thermometer routinely registered 120 degrees inside the compressor plant where I spent the three worst months of my life! Usually you go indoors to cool off, but in this case when we couldn’t stand it any longer and we needed to cool off, we went outside where it was only 105 degrees! At night we roustabouts would go to the grocery store and stand in front of the frozen foods section and apply frozen bags of peas as cold compresses. I read that when temperatures get over 91 degrees it can stunt cattle’s growth, efficiency and reproductive performance. I can say with certainty that after a day in that compressor plant my reproductive performance was certainly the last thing on my mind! And we certainly weren’t very efficient. We’d venture into the plant to tighten a big bolt one revolution before escaping continued on page three
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