Paradigm Shift

August 2012 Management Minute

by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist

We are all prisoners of our experience. Ag producers under 40 years old have never experienced a drought like the drought of 2011-2012. They may have only been teenagers during the drought of 1988 and can only remember what their elders may have talked about during the drought.

The drought of 2012 has certainly brought challenges to agriculture—challenges many producers have not faced before. But what becomes apparent is how different people respond during adversity. While some are held captive by “what we’ve always done”, others naturally and energetically seek out new ways to do things. Some avoid change until change is unavoidable, while others change as quickly as they are able to align the needed pieces. Sometimes, those slow to change are reluctant because they’ve been tremendously successful under the “old” paradigm, while others who are more “hungry” are willing to embrace the new adversity as a potential unconventional avenue to their own success.

Other times, it’s as simple as comfort with the existing way of doing things. But modern agriculture is capital intensive and markets are highly volatile. Comfort and change seem incompatible; change is inevitable and imminent, lurking just around the next corner. Comfort and complacency lead to a slothful loss of agility and nimbleness.

The beef industry is currently re-learning old lessons about ammoniation of wheat straw and corn stalks to improve their feeding value and to get the most value out of the crop. Early weaning of beef calves has taught us that young calves can be tremendously efficient at converting a high-quality diet to lean gain. Depending on the spring pricing opportunity for yearlings and available home-raised feed supplies, there may be an opportunity to add value to efficient, early-weaned calves, even with the current high feed costs.

If forage is in extremely short supply, survival may trump advancement; estimates suggest that beef producers with calves to sell in the next few years have an opportunity to capture record prices. In an attempt to keep the herd intact, some producers may cull replacement heifers simply out of the necessity to maximize immediate return on every feed dollar, retaining only the most productive mature females until the forage base and costs allow for a return to “business as usual”. While conventional wisdom says, “Replacement heifers represent our most progressive genetics!”, one could ask, “What good is genetic progress if I’m broke?”

“What we’ve always done” is not bad, wrong, or inappropriate. But the drought of 2011-2012 has taught us that we need to constantly re-evaluate what we do to make sure what we’re doing is right and best given the dynamics of production and the market place.

For more information, contact Chris at 785-532-1672 or cdr3@ksu.edu.