SHONE FARM BEEF CATTLE GUIDELINES
INTRODUCTION
The beef cattle at Shone Farm is a cow/calf operation maintained to assist and enhance the value
of a student’s experience by helping to facilitate the practical portion of classes as well as for
production and processing for sales with extensive grazing on 100 acres of pasture. Our goal is to
have about 25 cows per year and another 10 heifers and steers. Breeding is by natural cover from
January to March, weaning is May to June and calving is from September to December. The Shone
Farm Cattle Maintenance Calendar at the beginning of this section is a good reference for most of
the annual operations.
We use the body condition scores to provide us with seasonal performance standards of our cows
and our pasture. Year round observations and monitoring of the cattle is supervised by the
Livestock Technician and carried out by student employees 2 or 3 times daily.
Spring fed water troughs are available in all pastures and year round creeks are utilized by the
cattle for water, which also provide shade from their tree lined banks. Sixty percent of the pastures
are irrigated and capable of providing 60 to 70 percent of the nutritional needs of the herd.
Supplemental feed in provided in the form of alfalfa and grass hay from late fall to early spring.
Many of the Standard Agricultural Practice (refer to Maintenance Calendar) are performed by
students under the supervision of the Livestock Technician or the Livestock instructor. Our
veterinarian assists the instructor and students with pregnancy checking every spring.
All husbandry and health practices are coordinated by the Livestock Technician, with special
attention paid to any animal distress.
Animal identification is accomplished by ear tagging and is utilized to facilitate herd recording
keeping. Shone Farm will be moving toward Electronic I.D. ear tags while Hot Iron Branding is also
used to identify Shone Farm cattle and to comply with the Bureau of Livestock identification
regulations.
This document has sections titled Standard Operating Procedures which are written in red. These
serve as guidelines for the program and we print them out separately to create management
guidelines to train staff and students.
SHONE FARM – BEEF CATTLE
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