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An orange plastic hoop placed around a portion of tall grass on a range to provide a measurement.

You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure: Range Record Keeping

Range record keeping helps detect and demonstrate landscape changes that have a direct impact on your ability to maintain or grow your herd.

Cattle grazing a high-diversity, native pasture.

Connecting Nutrition and Conservation: The Importance of CPS 592

Conservation Practice Standard (CPS) 592 is a practical feed management framework that helps producers move toward greater profitability, accountability, and sustainability without sacrificing performance.

A livestock producer stands beside a concrete feed bunk at sunset, holding a tablet and reviewing feeding data. Several beef cattle with ear tags are eating a mixed ration from the trough. In the background, a feedlot mixer truck with a visible mixing tank and discharge auger delivers feed into the bunk, creating light feed dust in the air. The image represents modern feed management combining animal care and digital decision-making in a commercial feedlot.

Feed Management in a High-Data Livestock Industry

Livestock feeding systems are generating more data than ever before. In modern feed management, success depends less on how much data is collected and more on how effectively that data is translated into biologically sound decisions.

A male producer observing cattle in a feedlot.

Animal Nutrition Program’s Feed Management Committee: Feed to Gain Calculator - Fat Inclusion

Adding fat to cattle diets is a common strategy to increase dietary energy density. Learn how to make informed feed decisions using a feed-to-gain breakeven calculator developed by the National Animal Nutrition Program Feed Management Committee.

Illustration of a rancher making a management decision that triggers a chain of dominoes representing different technologies such as wearable livestock sensors, genetics, satellites, drones, modeling, and data analytics. The falling dominos symbolize how management actions create effects that unfold over time, often with delayed and unintended consequences. Zeros and ones in the background represent the increasing amount of data modern ranchers must interpret when making decisions.

From One Decision to Many Outcomes: Why feed management decisions ripple through beef production systems

Feed management is the starting point of a system that rewards informed decisions and magnifies uninformed ones. Producers who use feed informed nutrition models are often able to reduce waste, increase gains, and decrease costs.

Cow with calf in winter pasture.

Matching Winter Forage Supply to Herd Needs

Most operations feed hay based on convenience rather than cow requirements. Feeding the same hay to all cattle throughout the winter may be simple and efficient, but it often leads to overspending, or underfeeding.

Black beef cattle at a feedbunk at an SDSU research facility.

Replacing Distillers Grains with Heat-Treated Soybeans to Increase Finishing Cattle Growth

Heat-treated soybeans offer interesting attributes that could enhance cattle growth. The SDSU Feedlot Research group recently examined how they can fit into modern cattle feeding diets.

Aerial view of the SDSU Southeast Research Farm.
Jan 06

Southeast Research Farm Seminars @ Dakota Farm Show

Join SDSU Extension for a series of educational presentations during the Dakota Farm Show from January 6-7, 2026, at the USD DakotaDome (1101 N Dakota St, Vermillion, SD 57069).

A green cut alfalfa field dries as the sun sets.

Forage Inventory and Demand Calculator

Calculator for inventorying livestock and forage on hand to determine additional forage purchase needs, or livestock sales.

stack of coins with faded chart lines showing in the foreground

Move the Cows or Move the Feed

This calculator is designed to aid producers making the decision to buy feedstuffs and haul the feed to the operation, or to haul the cattle to the feedstuffs.