Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is talking with New Mexico cattle producer, Will Sowers, about his experience with Performance Beef, a cattle management software that simplifies feeding, performance, and data recording.
Sowers and his family have a ranch in northeastern New Mexico near Clayton. In the middle of a drought about a decade ago, Sowers added a backgrounding yard to his cow-calf operation to increase flexibility in marketing his animals.
As the backgrounding yard added a great deal of record-keeping to his plate, Sowers said he found answers in Performance Beef.
“I gave Performance Beef a call, and after about a two-hour consultation with them on the phone, they had every question I had answered in great detail,” Sowers said. “The sheer amount of time it saved me- I can’t even add it up.”
With Performance Beef, Sowers said everything he feeds daily is recorded, and he can see the breakeven on his cattle each day.
“The fact that I don’t have to stay up until midnight doing paperwork to get bills out to my customers…once the calves ship that day, I can have a bill for them that day, they know exactly what they have in their cattle, they know what they have into them prior to shipping, and those are the big things for me,” Sowers said. “Now that they have added the animal health side to it, I can keep track of all the medicine those cattle were given, when they were given shots, and what they were given.”
Now that Sowers has been utilizing Performance Beef, he said he cannot imagine feeding cattle without it.
“It is the peace of mind and knowing exactly what I have got out there on my cattle side, on my feed side, and it is just a huge stress reliever,” Sowers said.
Coming soon, Performance Beef is working on a ranch software specifically for cow-calf operators.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
