Cattle Brands & Supporting Idaho Ag

Cattle Brands & Supporting Idaho Ag

Cattle Brands & Supporting Idaho Ag. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

Cattle brands have been the method of choice for marking who owns a cow for years. There are other methods including earmarks, tags and others but when it comes down to it the brand is the primary identifier. Rodger Huffman of the Oregon Department of Agriculture says at this time of year, though, brands can be hard to see.

HUFFMAN:  There's a higher incidence of mistakes when people are bringing animals in because they maybe haven't checked with what the neighbors are doing and some of their systems are too similar. So they are missing some of those things and presenting neighbors' cattle for sale. A brand is certainly the ultimate way to determine ownership. But all of the other things they could do– the earmarks, the tags– all of those things are probably equally important as far as the initial sorting of ownership.

Idaho's proposed fiscal 2017 budget may give the University of Idaho an influx of funds for their College of Agricultural and Life Sciences but those dollars would go to payroll with no new operating monies. The dean of CALS told members of the states legislature that agriculture benefits from the research done at the college and said that they are looking at new ways to help them adapt new technology in addition to helping develop new irrigation methods to save water and energy.

That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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