The full text of this article is on the “Ranching School of Hard Knocks” web page, and it perfectly describes many different ways to go broke ranching without hardly trying.

by Walt Davis, Calera , OK, December 10, 1999

There have been how-to books on lots of different subjects lately, and I thought that it might be nice to help those people who get up every morning and wonder “what can I do today to lose money in the ranching business?” There is bound to be a huge demand for this kind of information since regardless of weather or markets, losing money is the main topic of conversation in every coffee shop in the country. The following is a collection of thoughts that should be of use in preventing any accidental out break of profitability. More > > >

On June 10 we will give a talk on Stockmanship to the Top of the Ozarks Grazing Group in Houston, Missouri. Attendance is limited to members of the group and their guests. In the morning Richard will give three hours of “classroom” talk, and in the afternoon he will give a demonstration using a local producer’s cattle.

When we spoke in Canada in March, we met Nancy Lidster who, with her husband Don, has developed an excellent video on handling confinement pigs using stockmanship techniques they learned from Bud Williams.

Check out their web page here.

These techniques work with all types and classes of livestock!

After two weeks of pretty good rainfall, the U.S. drought monitor has lowered SW Missouri and eastern Oklahoma to D1, moderate drought. I can see many ponds filling and other good signs, however, the subsoil is still dry. I’m still going to be careful about my stocking rate in case the rains don’t continue.

The drought monitor web page has an animation of the drought maps of the 12 past weeks here. It gives a nice “movie” of the movement of the drought types across the U.S.