Soil Erosion Control after Wildfire

Please take some time to read this fact sheet from CSU.  The full pdf can be found by clicking here.  In the coming months, we will focus on things like water quality after a fire, wildfire mitigation, etc. to help us all be more prepared for when the next one strikes.  

AgPlan Financials

A while back I found this beauty of an excel spreadsheet called Ag Plan Financials. If you have gone in for a loan lately, you know that banks are getting more and more stingy about loaning money.  They want to see all of your records and especially that line item that has always eluded my portfolio called "cash flow".

This spreadsheet is very comprehensive and allows you to do asset entry, inventory, liabilities, loans, balance sheets, and cash flows.  It even has spreadsheets for proposed loans, projected inventories, and final income and cash flows.

It will take you a little time to fill out and is as tedious as doing a loan application. But it should, however, put you ahead of the next person coming to get a loan that hasn't done their homework.

I hope it is something that works well for you and gets you on the right path to securing that next loan to help build your enterprise!

Use the link below.  All you need to do is download it and enable editing and you're on your way!

AgPlan Financial Worksheet

Calculating Cow Carrying Costs

Here is another cool little tool from our ABM team!  Click the link to check it out!

Cow Carrying Costs Calculator

Buying vs Raising Replacement Heifers

If you're like me, the magical time of shipping calves and seeing a payday is coming up fast!  Looking at markets and determining where to go and when can be a daunting but necessary task to get your optimal payout. 

Another task at hand is determining whether or not you should keep back replacement heifers, how many, and what will it cost to do so.  So many factors can play into your decision like how many open cows you may have, their age, body condition, availability of feed and its price, and so on. 

If you are not aware, CSU Extension's Ag Business Management Team has some nifty worksheets to help you with such decisions. In the next few weeks, I will post some of these worksheets to you here on the blog.  I know these have come in handy for me from time to time and I hope their are as helpful to you. 

Today's worksheet focuses on buying vs raising replacement heifers.  It will help you determine feed costs, vet costs, breeding costs, etc. vs what you think you could go buy a replacement heifer.  Click on the link below to bring up the sheet.  Then you can save it to your files if you wish.  Good luck!



Buying vs Raising Replacement Heifers Worksheet

Fertilizing Mountain Meadows

Happy Wednesday!

I was surfing some ag fact sheets and came across this beauty that I thought could be relevant to a lot of you.  I realize the image is not the best so you can download the pdf here.

I don't have a huge grasp on the wants and needs of agriculture in this area yet, so I hope to rely on your suggestions to make the content in this blog as relevant to you as possible.

Enjoy!

Hello Fremont County!

My name is Jeramy McNeely and I am the new Fremont County Extension Director.  I have been here since July 2nd and things so far are outstanding!  I've met a slew of new people since my arrival and made it through my first Fremont County Fair unscathed.  I'm looking forward to a long career here in Fremont Co.

If you are unaware of my background, I come from Kit Carson, CO and until coming here, was the Agent in Kiowa Co.  Having grown up on and managed farms and ranches, as well as having my own cow herd, my experience with agriculture is pretty extensive.  I love agriculture and through my new position, I want to utilize that passion along with my experience and research abilities to do what I can to help you with your operations. 

So whether you have a hobby farm, irrigation operation, or 1,000 head cow-calf operation, we can research and find solutions to many questions you might have.  I have at my fingertips my own knowledge, Master Gardener's, Extension Specialists, and Professors on campus as resources to help get you the information you desire. 

I started this blog while as an agent in Kiowa Co to be proactive in getting information out to producers.  It ranges from topics that either interested me as a cow-calf producer, things that floated across my desk, or from questions generated by producers like you.  Although a good portion of the information is more relevant to the Eastern Plains, I left it on here so that you could see what we were trying to accomplish.  Also, I hope it will encourage you to ask your own questions, let us research it, and get the information out to you as well as other producers who may have the same questions.

So how do I get this information to you?  It's very simple.  If you would like to be on our producer mailing list, send me your email to jeramy.mcneely@colostate.edu.  I will put you on the list and every time we enter information on the blog, I will send out a link to your email with the subject of the article.  We will also post the link on our facebook page and you can find a link to the blog on our website: http://fremont.extension.colostate.edu/.  That's it!  Hopefully in the future, you will see a lot of our information in the local papers as well.

Finally, Blake Osborn, our regional water specialist, is basing operations out of our office!  We are excited to have Blake in the office and have already used his expertise to our full advantage.  He has also agreed to contribute to this blog and I couldn't be more excited!  We have been brainstorming some ideas and hopefully you will see those ideas come to fruition in the near future. 

Thank you for reading this and I hope this blog becomes your go to resource for your operations!

Take care

Jeramy