Tim's Country Corner

The University Of Missouri has a yearly field day for agriculture students at their research center in Mt.Vernon,Missouri.There are many farmers, college professiors, and extension specialists there to teach students about topics like dairy products and beef products. Livestock are there for demostrations, career opputunities are discussed, and several other agriculture areas are covered. We went to three different presentations, Dairying, Beef Scoring, and Ruminant Nutrition.
Dairying:Milk comes in 1%, 2%, and whole milk, which is 3.25%.Whole turkey is 95% fat free, so it has 5% fat, therefore milk is a low fat product.Farmers are starting to put their cows on pasture because it is too expensive to keep them in a barn and feed silage. Cows should be bred in May so they will calve in February or March when grass starts growing.
Body Condition Scoring:Texas A&M developed guidelines to compare cattle according to their appearance in the 1980's. The cattle were scored on a scale from 1-9. Thin body types are 1-4, 5-7 is the ideal, and 8-9 are the obese cows. The best time to evaluate is 6 weeks before calving and 6 weeks after calving. Poor scoring results in diffuculty breeding, newborns are not healthy, cows need help when there giving birth, cows have lower pregnancy rate, and bull calves dont gain well, and have poor quality semen.
Ruminant Nutrition: All dairy cows have one stomach but four compartments. The name of the largest one was the Rumen, and it holds 150-200 pounds of feed and water. Cows produce 17 gallons of saliva a day to help in the digestion process. There're 3 trillion microorganisms:bacteria, protozoa, and fungi they are the ones who digest the food. They usaully put a magnent in another compartment called the reticulumn and they do that because cows tend to eat a lotof hardware while they graze. The other part of the stomach is called the osasum it is the third part of the ruminant stomach where feed is mixed with gastric juices and digestion is carried on here.
Field Day was a really interesting day,  I learned a lot of information that i could use in the future