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BOOK REVIEW: Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production
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In Defending Beef, author Nicolette Hahn Niman takes on no easy task: as the title suggests, this vegetarian cattle rancher seeks to exonerate beef from the many ills for which it’s blamed, both from ecological and nutritional perspectives. She anticipates every argument, discussing everything from the role cattle play in water contamination, soil health, and…
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Hay You! Should I Make My Hay or Buy It?
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By Rich Taber, CCE Chenango As the haying season winds down across the northeast, I am left to ponder the eternal question; should I keep on trying to make hay for my livestock every year, or buy it? Well, “the devil is in the details”, as the old saying goes. First off, I am going…
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Quality of Winter Forage for Grass-fed Sheep
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Feeding hay in the winter is in many parts a reality in the Northeast. You will hear often these days that the best way to deal with hay in a grass-fed operation is to rid yourself of hay feeding and graze stockpiled forage instead. In my view it is true that extending the grazing season is a good and desirable goal…
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Quality of Winter Forage for Grass-fed Sheep
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Feeding hay in the winter is in many parts a reality in the Northeast. You will hear often these days that the best way to deal with hay in a grass-fed operation is to rid yourself of hay feeding and graze stockpiled forage instead. In my view it is true that extending the grazing season is a good and desirable goal…
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Rest is Not a 4-Letter Word
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Timing for Pasture Recovery– Part 1 The biggest mistake people make in grazing management is providing too short a recovery period for plants after grazing. Of course too much rest isn’t good either. In drier environments excluding animals from a pasture long after it has recovered will lead to reduced productivity, dead grass and bare…
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Low-Cost Seeding Methods for Improving Pastures and Haylands
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Methods to improve old unproductive pastures and hayfields that are both effective and economical are a common challenge for farmers, and especially so for new and beginning farmers. The time and cost for re-seeding includes multiple passes of tractors and tillage machinery including plowing, disk harrowing, spring tooth harrowing, rock picking, planting, and packing to establish a new planting, far more work and cost than…
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Concerned Citizens and Vilified Farmers: Thoughts on Animal Welfare Complaints
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The growing divide between farmer and citizen intersects at the topic of animal welfare. I received a call today from a concerned citizen who was worried about some cattle that had been left out for the winter. I was happy that they called me first instead of the authorities, and we had a calm and intelligent…
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Improved Meat Marketing for Small Scale and Direct Marketing Farms in the Northeast
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For small-scale farms, the need for marketing skills has increased as the local food marketplace has become crowded with more competition. Perhaps 15 years ago the supply of local meat was smaller than the demand, allowing farms to simply “show up and sell out” in their markets. However, here in the Northeast we have seen…
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List of Items for a Beginning Sheep Farmer, Part Two
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I will continue in this part 2 of the article on individual supplies and tools you will need to get started with Sheep. See the Summer 2017 issue of the Small Farm Quarterly for Part 1. I leave it up to you to research where you get the best price or what combination of items…
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List of Items for a Beginning Sheep Farmer, Part One
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List of Items for a Beginning Sheep Farmer, Part One: Tips and Resources for Beginning Sheep Farmers “What do I need when I start?” It is a question that is posed to me often. The almost inevitable follow-up question almost always is “Where do I get it”? I figured I should compile a list of items…
Livestock & Dairy
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