In most offices, you’ve got to watch what you say.  After a recent day of on-the-farm training, our Ag Practice folks might offer more practical advice:  Watch where you step.

Twelve team members went to “Pasturepalooza,” hosted by our own Callie Birdsell.  On Callie’s beef cattle farm, the group got hands-on experience and also helped with the annual herd vaccination.

Callie, a former extension agent, showed them how to handle and vaccinate cattle to Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) standards, which are essential to minimizing muscle lesions to improve carcass quality.

It sounds like our team had their hands – or maybe their gloves – full right away. “Ellie Mae,” a first calf heifer and former show girl, was happy to demonstrate how tough it can be to keep a soon-to-be-vaccinated animal from escaping.

Next up was running the calves through the chute, which proved to be a challenge even for experienced folks like Nick Flanigan, Luke Spainhour and Dennis Hecht.  It was much easier, it seems, for the team to identify some of weed problems on the farm, including thistles, blackberries, buttercup, dew berries and dogfennel.

No “palooza” would be complete without food, so Rich Bennek, our resident nutritionist, helped everyone understand the importance of a balanced ration by looking at a forage analysis of the pastures, a silage sample and feed labels from packaged creep feed.  As Dale Winstead noted, “Digestibility is essential to improve gains and milk production.  A forage analysis is necessary, as are annual fertilization and herbicide applications, to help keep pastures clean of weeds.”

Yep.  Wrangling calves and identifying weeds.  Just another day on the job at Technekes.