Blog Archive November 2009

It was the big female sale weekend in the Midwest.  A few sale reports that can be found at EDJECast and Liveauctions.tv (average price of bred heifers listed in parentheses)…

• No Bull Sale
  Bred Heifers - $3,500
• Mid-Continent Farms
  (simulcast at Fall Classic was very nice)
  Bred Heifers - $1,950
  Open Heifers - $3,450
• Dream Girls Sale
  Show Heifers - $3,300
  Bred Heifers - $3,000
  Bred Cows - $1,850

I made so many mistakes Friday that it would be irresponsible to not post something about it.

#5 – Wearing my boots into the house.

This one is just obligatory for my wife who really couldn’t care less about the rest of the list.

#4 – Moving cattle with newborn calf.

The cow from the #1 item is the most protective non-American we’ve had in a long time.  It took a solid ten minutes to get her out of the holding pens with her one-day old calf and we had to group her with the rest of the herd to do it.  We assumed that as attached as she was she ought to be just fine moving across the road and wouldn’t leave her calf.

About 30-minutes later after we finally caught the calf and drove him the quarter mile to his mother we found out we were wrong.

#3 – Driving through gate.

I don’t want to over generalize but it’s been my experience that situations involving running down the road waving your arms screaming help are typically bad.

While driving out of a one acre holding pen with the trailer I decided I had enough time to get through before the Charoalis cow and lot 22 from Black’s sale would make it to the gate.  I was wrong, that Charolais is a former show heifer and she’s a trouble maker.  Luckily three people stopped and helped get them back in.

#2 – Using a MoviePix camera

The last thing I did yesterday was shoot some footage of that Shorthorn steer I blogged  about this August.  While I have five different video cameras here in my office I decided to go light weight and take the new MoviePix 720p camera I got off of Woot as a spare.

For the record, NEVER waste money on a MoviePix camera.  Out of 15-minutes of footage there was only about 20 seconds that came out anywhere near acceptable.

If you want to see the footage we did keep, CLICK HERE.  Remember, that's the only part of the footage that was good enough to even think about using, that camera is terrible.  I’m going to reshoot the calf on Tuesday, he’ll be sold on here sometime in December.

#1 – Not respecting a SimAngus cow.

The first thing I did yesterday was get my ass kicked.

When the bulk of your experience working cattle is around commercial Brahman influenced females you tend to lose that level of caution that is necessary to operate properly around other breeds.  It’s sort of like paying all attention to Germany while taking a pacifist view of Russia during WWII.

That’s what made my walking around a newborn calf admiring her so stupid in hindsight.  Before I realized it I was thrown into the corner of the pen trying to decide whether to try and escape through the water trough or over the fence.  Luckily with every slam of the cow’s head into my upper leg she pushed me up.  Eventually she allowed me to get high enough to get over the fence.

There’s no visible bruises but she put a nice little hitch in my giddyup.

....oh, and if anybody is looking for a conveniently sized and cheaply priced 720p video camera, shoot me a line.  I have one for sale.

Last week I had the opportunity to bother our vet on a Saturday and pay him for a weekend call out to the farm to give one of our more maternal cows an IV.  She had a pretty bad case of grass tetany.

(For the record, we wouldn’t have bothered with some cows but this girl has a tendency to throw killer F1 Brahman x Maine heifers every year.  We wouldn’t even have found that out if it weren’t for her bent cervix which prevented her from being AI’d)

After doing some more research on grass tetany, it would have been a miracle if she didn’t come down with it…

1. The place was owned by various millionaires and billionaires over time whose managers were constantly using high potassium fertilizers.  We knew the place was lacking because cows demolish liquid mineral on the place compared to our other pastures.
2. Our ryegrass in that pasture is just now starting to come up.
3. She calved two days prior.
4. She had been on relatively low nutrient level pastures earlier this year due to drought.
5. In all the commotion this Fall, we were lacking in our mineral program compared to years past.  In fact, the pasture she’s in, what we call the maternity ward, is the only pasture we didn’t have minerals in…because we’re idiots.
6. She’s fairly old (about 8 years)

In fact, her situation is pretty much a summary of what causes it.  The symptom that hits you in the fact is she’s sitting down and cannot get up.  The magnesium shortage prevents muscle contractions from firing properly and attempts to stand look like a baby deer trying to walk on an ice rink.

When the vet came out, he administered an IV with magnesium in the neck to get her up ASAP.  He also injected the same 500 ml on the right side to allow it to trickle down to the small intestine and be absorbed to help her out over the next few days.  There were also the customary penicillin (which I refused to administer because of an unfortunate incident where I found I’m allergic to it the day of the A&M job fair my senior year) and B12 shots that he likes to give cattle when they in high stress situations.

She was ready to pop up and start moving by the time the second IV was administered

Google Maps now includes property boundary information for locations it has the data.  From what I can tell, this is a fairly new feature of Google Maps but please correct me if I’m just the last one to notice it.  The earliest references I could find to it were in October.

I wasn’t aware of it until I pulled up our working pens to try and explain a plan I had for some new holding pens.  I noticed there was a line on my parent’s adjacent pasture where there isn’t a fence, road, or anything to differentiate property.  That’s because it’s the pad site of a tower (similar to a cell phone tower) in the middle of a pasture.  The tower owners technically own the base of it but a stranger wouldn’t know there’s a property boundary because well, there isn’t.  We run cattle under the tower on a 99 year lease kind of deal.

It must be based on counties because if you go just a mile or so West on that map, you’ll run into Atascosa County and there isn’t any property boundary information for that county.

The fact you could snoop around a neighbor’s property is nothing new for Google Maps (I had always wondered what was in the middle of that 2,000 acre deer lease next door) but this is the first time I’ve seen them add information that isn’t easily available.  I know people got upset about street view and privacy concerns and that’s nothing compared to the information this is providing.

It's a fairly new site run by a gentleman out of Midland, TX.  Most of the information is from RSS feeds (and I'm not a big enough hypocrite to judge them for it) but what sets the site apart from others is the long list of tools they have available for free use.  Honestly, I'm kicking myself for not doing it here a long time ago.

In fact, there are so many tools that it would be a waste of time for me to list them here.  Go visit YourAgNow.com and see them for yourself.

Music on Websites

As if there was any doubt left... http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/index.php?topic=14399.0

Heat Wave Daughters

We went 8 for 8 on Heat Wave heifers this year, not a single steer out of 15 matings, unfreakinbelievable. 

Site Down Time

Not that this site is mission critical to anybody that reads it but we might be down for a few hours over the weekend while some hardware issues are addressed.  Our current hardware has been humming right along for about four years and it's time to look into swapping some of it out.

Recently Updated Site Spider Moving Again

It was down for a few days because I hand't taught the little guy to deal with some types of malformed links when looking for new sites to index, specifically...

---

<a href="../namereplaced/index.htm"><b><font face="Arial" size="2">nam</font></b><font face="Arial" size="2"><strong>ereplaced Show Calves</strong></font></a>

---

...and he just threw his virtual arms up and said he doesn't get paid enough to deal with this.  HTML code such as the above is a sure fire sign somebody is using Frontpage to manage their website and not looking at the code behind it.

(The actual URL was replaced because it wasn't the fault of the person who bought the link)

1. Ranchers.net 36.71%
2. Cattle-Today 31.62%
3. Steerplanet 23.05%
4. 5BarX 3.72%
5. Advantage Cattle Services 3.32%
6. Clubcalves 0.89%
7. Breedersworld 0.58%
8. Showsteers 0.06%
9. EDJE 0.05%

The same assumption as last month was made for Ranchers.net.

Full Report Here

1. Cattle Today Sites 20.75%
2. CattleNetwork.com 14.10%
3. Cattle.com 11.19% (4)
4. Cattlerange.com 11.06% (3)
5. Beefmagazine.com 8.39%
6. Drovers.com 7.85% (7)
7. Showsteers.com 7.62% (6)
8. Steerplanet.com 2.98% (NR)
9. Clubcalves.com 2.84% (8)
10. Cattlepages.com 2.69%

Nothing much changed other than the usual monthly shuffling in the 3-7 range.

As a reminder, the index is made up of data from Compete.com (40%), Quantcast.com (40%), and Google Ad Planner (20%).

If you don’t care about techie stuff, I’d suggest moving on to the next site you check and not wasting your time on this blog post.

One of the larger bullet points from last week’s Pubcon in Las Vegas came from Matt Cutts (the public face of Google as far as web developers are concerned) who strongly suggested that Google will begin to use page speed in its ranking algorithm next year.  It’s already a factor in Adwords but he suggested using 2010 as a year to speed up sites.

While going through and checking our sites for speed I decided to see what kind of page load speeds the kind of people who visit this site are used to.

YSlow Rating

Yslow is a tool within Firebug (for Firefox) that rates pages based on how well they’re optimized for faster loading.  It doesn’t take file size into consideration, just how well the data is optimized for fast loading.  Things that contribute to a better rating include ensuring pages are using gzip, longer term header expiration dates, and optimized CSS.

The average Yslow rating for the 54 sites checked was 75.52 and the top 10% were at 87 or higher.

This is the only thing looked I considered that there's no excuse of developers to ignore.  There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have large page sizes and thus slower load times.  A person doesn't have to change their site layout at all in order to optimize it to load faster.

Page Load Time

For the purpose of the test, we used the default settings (DSL, Virginia) on Webpagetest.org.  While file size for pages plays a large role in page load time, servers and other factors come into play as well.

The average page load time for the 54 sites was 6.6 seconds and the top 10% were at 1.83 seconds or less.

Page Size

This one was the shocker.  While I’m admittedly a minimalist design guy myself, I would have never guessed that the average size of the 54 cattle related portals checked was a whopping 617kb.  I've always considered 100kb to be pushing the limits but even the top 10% were at 79kb or less. 

I went back and ran the test a few times on Clubcalves.com to make sure the data was right because their front page currently consists of 7.3 MEGABYTES of information. 

Overall Rating

I took those three factors and used them to come up with an overall rating.  I promise I didn’t game it for Cattle.com, it’s just a natural by-product of the fact I don’t like fluff.  In fact, if you look at this page right now, there’s nothing on it that doesn’t serve some sort of purpose.

The pages that were above the average index rating of 2.04 were…

1. Cattleconnections.com 11.68
2. Thecattlebaron.com 6.94
3. Texasshowcattle.com 4.62
4. Cattle.com 4.45
5. Showsteers.com 4.44
6. Cattle-today.com 3.95
7. Gelbvieh.org 3.66
8. Chicattle.org 3.65
9. Santagertrudis.com 3.54
10. Advantagecattle.com 3.36
11. Showtowin.com 3.14
12. Showcattle.com 2.87
13. Cattleco.com 2.84
14. Edjecast.com 2.50
15. Oklahomashowsteer.com 2.37
16. Cattlemanagement.com 2.14
17. Cattlepages.com 2.10

We ran the test on 54 sites from the cattle site traffic report, the ones listed are just the ones that ended up above average.  (If you know your site is tracked in that report but not listed here, e-mail me at jeff@cattle.com and I’ll send you the rating/rank.  It's not hard to see how your compare by running the tests yourself though.).

Does this mean I think everyone should scrap all images and go as minimalist as Cattleconnections.com?  Well, yes, if I was the only person looking at cattle sites, but I am not.  And while I do prefer a minimalist layout, I do realize and can appreciate the purpose behind nice designs.

However, this does mean sites should pay attention and put a little time into making their sites and their client sites load faster. 

Irrelevant but fun to watch...

Verizon responds to AT&T's "map for that" lawsuit 

[This is the first in a group of blog posts blatantly ripped inspired by various things I learned at Pubcon last week]

So you want to start an online business?  Of course you do!  There is a new ag site popping up every other day and pretty soon it's going to be your turn.

Bob Brisco of Internet Brands gave an excellent summary of what it takes to be successful in his keynote presentation the last day of the Pubcon conference last week.  Some of the stats he brought up…

• 50 million people have attempted to start an online business in one form or another
• 96% of them failed or just gave up
• 1 in 200 of that remaining 4% make $50,000/year income
• 1 in 600 of that 4% make $250,000/year income
• 1 in 2,000 of that 4% make $1,000,000/year income
• 40% of those that do make money are still successful after five years 

When I stop to think about it, I’ve started nearly as many sites that were failures as successes.  Only a few of my sites are capable of standing on their own two feet without being subsidized by the others (and this is not one of them).

The most important part of his presentation was his list of ingredients required to make a site work.  Honestly, I always thought it was pretty simple but that’s just because I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with an idea and a bit of work ethic.  However, his recipe for success was as clear and concise as it gets:

• Focus
• Uniqueness
• Community
• Content
• Monetization
• Passion 

That last one is by far and away the most important.  If knowing there was no chance of making money on a site prevents you from starting it, then you had no reason to start it anyhow.  Without passion as motivation, there is little chance of success.

It's rare that you see something that seems like a genuinely fresh idea in the ag portion of the Internet but I've gotta say that the new "boot camp" service from RHD certainly seems to fit that description...

The RHD Boot Camp

Most of the lack of updates has been due to helping my dad while my grandfather was hanging on in hospice.  He finally passed on Friday night, bringing a 74-year marriage to an end.  I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that the 74th year is the toughest.

Want advice on how to live 96-years?  Be the kind of old German cuss that can go out in the middle of a working pen at the age of 88, get thrown the ground by a charging cow’s straight shot to the chest, get up and ask your grandson to brush you off.

Calving Ease

It’s no secret we just got done with an insanely bad drought.  With the end of that drought also came the end of our light birth weights.

We had only pulled three calves over the past two years and two of those were breach calves.  Last week, after having lush green grass for the last two months of gestation, we had to pull four calves in three days, all from cows.