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Proven Parasite Control for Beef Producers

Posted on April 13, 2026 by A.Miller-Cattle-Admin

Proven Parasite Control for Beef Producers

External parasites are a constant challenge in cattle operations, quietly cutting into performance and profit. Flies, lice, ticks, and mites are the most common culprits, each affecting cattle in different ways. Left unmanaged, these pests lead to decreased gains and overall poor herd health. A consistent parasite control plan helps cattle stay comfortable, productive, and healthy, making it a key part of any successful cattle operation.

Profit Robbing Pests

External parasites are a common problem in cattle, flies, ticks, lice, and mites, can all hurt herd health and performance in different ways. Flies are often the most visible issue, with horn flies, stable flies, and face flies causing constant stress. Horn flies feed on blood many times a day, leading to irritation, blood loss, and lower weight gain. Stable flies bite the legs, which is painful and causes cattle to bunch together, reducing grazing time and increasing heat stress.

Face flies are a bigger concern for disease because they feed on the eyes and nose and spread pinkeye, which can cause eye damage, blindness, and lower weaning weights, and docking at the sale barn or buying point. Flies can also help spread diseases like Anaplasmosis. Anaplasmosis is a blood borne illness that causes weakness, poor performance, lethargy, and even at times death. We also see ticks transmitting this from cow to cow.

Ticks are less common day to day, but can be more dangerous because they carry serious diseases. These parasites attach to cattle and feed on blood for several days, increasing the risk of infection. Ticks can also spread Bovine babesiosis, sometimes called Texas cattle fever, which leads to high fever and severe anemia. They also spread Theileriosis, an emerging issue in some areas that also affects blood cells and overall performance. In rare cases, ticks can even cause paralysis due to toxins released while feeding.

Mites and lice are much smaller and harder to see, but they can still cause major problems. Mites live on or under the skin and lead to Mange, a condition that causes intense itching, hair loss, thickened skin, and sores. Lice feed on skin or blood, causing irritation, itching, and hair loss. Cattle infested with lice and/or mites spend more time rubbing and less time eating, leading to weight loss and poor condition. Heavy infestations can reduce performance and make cattle more prone to illness.

While each pest affects cattle in its own way, the end result is similar: lost performance, added stress, and increased risk of disease.

Economic Losses

University studies, especially from land-grant schools like the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), the University of Florida, and Kansas State University, show that flies on cattle hurt both health and profits. In the United States, these pests cost the cattle industry more than $2 billion each year. The main problem flies: horn flies, stable flies, and face flies, cause loss by slowing weight gain, cutting milk output, and spreading disease.

Research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), the University of Florida, and Kansas State University shows clear points where fly control pays off. Horn flies are the worst for cattle on pasture and cause about $1 to $2 billion in losses each year. Studies show they can cut weight gain in stockers and heifers by up to 18 percent and lower calf weaning weights by as much as 15 percent. Stable flies are also very harmful, both in lots and on pasture. UNL studies show they can reduce daily gain by up to 0.44 pounds per day and cost the industry over $2 billion each year. Experts say it makes sense to treat cattle when numbers reach about 200 horn flies per head or just five stable flies per leg.

Flies also hurt cattle’s health and behavior. Stable flies bite the legs, which is painful. Cattle will bunch up to avoid bites, which means they graze less and deal with more heat stress. Studies show this stress causes about 71.5 percent of lost weight gain, according to the university studies. Horn flies feed up to 40 times a day, leading to irritation, energy loss, and blood loss. Face flies feed on the eyes, nose, and mouth and spread Moraxella bovis, which causes pinkeye. This can lead to blindness and lower weaning weights in calves.

More studies show how much control helps. Research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when horn flies were controlled on cows, calves were 10 to 20 pounds heavier at weaning. The University of Kentucky found that flies can cause stocker cattle to lose up to 60 pounds over a 100-day summer. Work from the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service and UNL showed that controlling stable flies raised daily gain by 21 percent in grazing cattle.

Older data from 2005 to 2009 from The National Institutes of Health (.gov) helps show the size of the problem, and losses today are likely even higher. Pastured cattle lost about $1.26 billion from lower gains and blood loss. Dairy cattle lost about $360 million from less milk. Feeder cattle lost about $226 million from poor feed use, and cow-calf herds lost about $358 million from lower weaning weights.

All of this shows that fly control is not just helpful, it is key to making money. When producers manage flies at the right time, they can improve cattle health, boost performance, and protect profits.

Controlling External Parasites

Beef cattle producers use a wide range of tools to control pests, and most successful programs combine several methods rather than relying on just one. Research from universities like UNL and others strongly supports these efforts, showing clear improvements in cattle performance when parasites are controlled.

For flies, the most common control methods include insecticide ear tags, sprays, pour-ons, dust bags, back rubbers, feed-through products, and sanitation. Ear tags are one of the most widely used tools because they slowly release insecticide across the animal’s body through natural movement and grooming. Studies have shown these tags can reduce horn fly numbers by around 79%, and face flies by about 30%, with other methods like dust bags reducing horn flies by as much as 86%.

Sprays and pour-ons are also effective, especially for stable flies, but they require more frequent application to maintain control. Back rubbers and automatic sprayers allow cattle to treat themselves, which can improve coverage and reduce labor. Research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln shows that untreated cattle exposed to stable flies can lose about 0.44 pounds of average daily gain compared to treated cattle, proving that control directly impacts performance.

For ticks, control methods are similar in terms of chemical tools but often require a more targeted approach. Producers commonly use pour-ons, sprays, and dips that contain acaricides (tick-killing compounds). Pasture management also plays a role, including rotational grazing to reduce tick habitat. Research consistently shows that controlling ticks reduces the spread of diseases like anaplasmosis and improves overall herd health. Many of the same insecticide classes used in fly control (pyrethroids and organophosphates) are also effective against ticks. A good integrated pest management (IPM) plan can address multiple pests at once.

For lice and mites, producers typically rely on pour-on insecticides, injectable products, and sometimes dusts. Macrocyclic lactones are especially effective because they control both internal parasites and external pests like lice and some mites. Research and extension data consistently show that treating lice and mites improves weight gain, hair coat condition, and overall health, especially in young or stressed cattle.

Across all three parasite groups, the strongest research-backed approach is integrated pest management (IPM). Studies show that relying on a single method, such as ear tags alone, can lead to resistance over time, while rotating products and combining methods improves long-term control. Controlled-release insecticides, like those in ear tags, have even been shown to achieve over 90% fly control and nearly eliminate fly-related pinkeye in some trials.

Without a doubt, external pests, particularly flies, try to rob profits from ranches. Research shows that parasite control pays off. Whether it is flies reducing weight gain, ticks spreading disease, or lice hurting condition and overall appearance, using a mix of proven tools helps cattle stay healthier, gain better, and perform more efficiently.

May 2026

By Jessica Graham

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Four Generations of Women Shaping a Flint Hills Ranch

Posted on April 6, 2026April 9, 2026 by A.Miller-Cattle-Admin

Four Generations of Women Shaping a Flint Hills Ranch

From Wyoming coal country to the tallgrass prairie of the Kansas Flint Hills, four generations of women shaped a ranch – and the technology helping secure its future.

Barb Downey was twenty-two when she started a ranch with her father, Joe. Joe was fifty, which felt both late and exactly right, because he had spent most of his life trying to get back to this work. Ranching had never really left the family, but it had shifted and thinned and moved, like grass under different weather patterns, and when the chance came to rebuild in Kansas he took it. She stepped in beside him, fresh out of college, not so much inheriting something as entering into it mid-stride.

The story she carries did not begin in Kansas. It began with her great-grandmother, Marta Lissilo, in Wyoming coal country, a woman who had come from Italy with three children and joined her husband while he mined underground. As well as cooking for the miners and running the household, she also managed the money which bought their first piece of land which would change the trajectory of the family for generations to come.

“She saved enough for that first piece of land,” Barb says. “That was the start of the ranch.”

The ranch moved and adjusted through the Depression and the decades that followed. Women were never ornamental in that story. They administered the finances, shaped the decisions, held the family steady while the ground beneath them shifted. Barb grew up inside that rhythm. Leadership was something you assumed because the land and the cattle required it.

When Barb and her dad began again in Kansas, they were about ten miles east of Manhattan, in the Flint Hills, the last great stretch of tallgrass prairie in North America. Ranchers from Texas and Oklahoma have been sending stocker cattle here for more than a century, drawn by grass that grows deep-rooted and nutrient-dense over limestone and rock too stubborn to plow.

The land is beautiful, but it is also demanding. Barb’s dad handled the financial planning of the ranch while wrapping up his career with Dow, but he was never involved in the day-to-day management. The planning and running of the ranch was hers from the start, and later hers and her husband’s together. Barb learned by doing, calculating and recalculating what the land could carry and what the numbers would allow.

In Kansas, she says, people pay attention to what you contribute. “You’re measured by what you can bring to the table, not your gender.”

Barb has never thought of herself as a female rancher – she is a rancher. The work asks the same of everyone who undertakes it, and the tools have begun to shift what that work looks like.

Barb and husband Joe Carpenter’s daughters are part of that shift. Laura Carpenter, 26, will return to the ranch as she begins her veterinarian practice and will help out with the ranch’s herd health as part of a deliberate transition. Barb’s eldest daughter, Anna Carpenter, 28, a paramedic and firefighter, plans to handle a lot of the data and financial management.

Expansion has never been about getting bigger for the sake of it. It has been about keeping the ranch viable.

“To add another 100 cows, we’d need about 800 more acres,” she says. “At roughly $3,000 an acre, that’s around $2.5 million just in land.” she says. “It’s really hard to get commercial cows to pay for that.”

So, the answer wasn’t more land, but better management of the land they already had. They already practiced rotational grazing and knew it had increased carrying capacity. But traditional fencing had taken them as far as it could and adding more meant more labor and more cost layered onto tight margins.

“Halter enabled the expansion,” she says. “That was the economic driver behind the decision to secure the ranch’s future.”

Halter, a global leader in virtual fencing technology, allows ranchers to contain, monitor and move cattle directly from their phone, creating digital grazing boundaries without installing physical fences. For Downey Ranch, that meant intensifying rotational grazing without miles of new posts and wire and doing so in a way that aligned with the science Barb already trusted.

Barb laughs when she explains how the shift has changed the rhythm of the work between her and her husband Joe. The two operate as a true team in running the ranch and in life.

“I can’t drive T-posts into the ground,” she says. “But I can draw a break!”

The work has always demanded physical effort and the way it is managed now relies just as much on timing, observation and judgment. “Technology is a great equalizer!” she says.

Ranching, for Barb, has always been as much about the mind as the muscle. She talks about loving science and math and biology, about how animals and open air make sense to her in a way office lighting never could, and about the satisfaction of reading grass growth and herd movement the way others might read a balance sheet.

“In animal ag, oftentimes we are better off if we rely on our brain to figure out how to accomplish things,” she says. “You can’t force cattle and if you try, you’ve already failed. It has to be a relationship.”

Barb sees that reflected in Halter’s system. The collars provide cues the animals learn and respond to naturally. “It’s clear and understandable to them,” she says. “When they know what’s expected, everything works better – for us and for them.”

The technology that enabled the ranch’s expansion increased carrying capacity and gave the family confidence that the operation could sustain another generation, supporting a broader restructuring of the business itself.

“We made a family decision to do a big buy-out,” she says. “We took on a different way of operating so we could bring in another generation.”

Ranching, for Barb, is not something she describes as a career path. It is an identity shaped over time. “If you’re a ranch person, it’s a strong part of who you are,” she says. “We have a connection with the land and the animals who are like our family members.”

That connection informs every decision. “We approach everything we do, whether it’s production of our seed stock, as part of that larger picture of doing better with the resources we’re entrusted with every day,” she says. “We want to make sure everything we do makes something a little bit better for our customers, our cattle, our family, and the grassland resource that we shepherd.”

The female line that began with a woman cooking for miners and saving enough to buy her first piece of land continues today in different forms. Virtual fencing allows Barb and her husband to manage movement, increase carrying capacity and make expansion decisions that once required miles of wire and heavy labor. It gives her daughters a ranch that is data-driven, economically viable and built for long-term stewardship.

Leadership on this land has always belonged to those willing to hold it. Technology is widening who can hold it, and how.

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Using C-Lock Data Management to Build a More Efficient Cow Herd

Posted on March 20, 2026March 23, 2026 by Jessica Graham

Using Data to Build a More Efficient Cow Herd

C-Lock Inc. Helps Cow-Calf Producers Improve Genetics, Feed Efficiency, and On-Farm Decisions

Cow-calf producers have always relied on good stockmanship, experience, and observation to make herd management decisions. That hasn’t changed. But the economics have. With the U.S. cattle herd at its smallest size in more than 70 years, every cow on the place is worth more today than at any point in recent memory. Feed costs remain volatile, input prices aren’t coming down, and the margin for error on a breeding decision is thinner than it’s been in a generation.

That’s where on-ranch monitoring tools come in. Systems developed by C-Lock Inc.—including GreenFeed, SmartFeed, and SmartScale—are giving cattle producers access to individual animal data that used to be available only in university research herds. Feed intake, growth performance, and methane emissions can now be measured on individual animals under normal working conditions. For cow-calf producers, this kind of information translates directly into better breeding decisions, lower feed costs, and a more productive cow herd.

Why Feed Efficiency Matters in Cow-Calf Operations

Feed represents the largest single expense in beef production, accounting for 70–75% of total operating costs on most operations. When feed is your biggest cost, even a small improvement in efficiency moves the needle on profitability—and those improvements compound over time.

One key trait used to evaluate efficiency is Residual Feed Intake, or RFI. In plain terms, RFI measures the difference between how much feed an animal actually consumes and how much she should need based on her size and rate of gain. A low-RFI cow eats less than expected while maintaining the same performance. A high-RFI cow eats more than she should for what she’s producing. Research has shown that high- and low-RFI cattle can differ in intake by as much as eight pounds of feed per day. Across a herd of 200 cows over a winter feeding period, that kind of variation adds up fast.

Because RFI is heritable, enough to make real progress in two to three generations of intentional selection, choosing efficient cattle today means a more efficient herd five and ten years from now. Unlike a management change you repeat every year, genetic improvement is permanent and cumulative. The challenge has always been measuring individual feed intake. In a grazing system where cows eat side by side, knowing which ones are efficient and which ones aren’t has been nearly impossible, until now.

Knowing What Each Cow Actually Eats

SmartFeed is an individual intake monitoring system that reads each animal’s RFID ear tag and records exactly how much supplement or feed she consumes, every visit. Recent research has validated that SmartFeed accurately tracks both individual intake and feeding patterns—when she comes in, how long she stays, and how much she takes—in grazing cattle under normal working conditions. For cow-calf producers, this kind of data opens up several practical advantages. You can identify efficient cattle that consume less feed while maintaining productivity. You can evaluate whether your supplement program is actually working across the herd. And you can see intake variation that’s completely hidden when cattle are group-fed.

That last point matters more than most producers realize. Studies of grazing cattle have shown that supplement intake can vary two- to threefold between animals in the same pasture. Some cows consume far more than their share while others barely touch it. That variation directly affects performance, body condition, and reproductive outcomes. Understanding which animals use feed efficiently changes how you think about replacement selection. Keeping heifers out of cows that maintain good condition on less feed lowers your annual cow carrying cost for the next decade.

Tracking Growth Without Running Them Through the Chute

Weight gain and growth performance are the other side of the efficiency equation. SmartScale is an automated walk-over weighing platform that records body weights each time an animal crosses it on the way to water or feed—no chute, no labor, no stress. Continuous weight data gives a much clearer picture of growth trends than occasional chute weights. Daily weights can also be used to estimate dry matter intake (the actual feed consumed, minus water weight) and evaluate grazing performance across pastures and seasons.

For cow-calf producers, this means identifying animals that convert forage into weight gain more efficiently, detecting health or nutritional issues earlier—often before they’re visible—and making better stocking rate and forage utilization decisions. Together, intake from SmartFeed and weight data from SmartScale allow producers to calculate feed efficiency traits that were previously impossible to measure in pasture-based systems.

Measuring Methane: Feed Energy You’re Paying For

Here’s a number worth thinking about: 6–10% of the total energy in every pound of feed a cow eats leaves as methane gas during digestion. That’s feed you’re paying for that’s going into the air instead of into growth or milk. While methane is often discussed in environmental and sustainability conversations, it’s also an efficiency issue. An animal that loses less energy to methane has more energy available for production. And the variation between individual animals is significant.

The GreenFeed system measures methane and carbon dioxide production from individual animals under normal conditions. The animal walks up to the unit, puts her head in to receive a small amount of bait feed, and while she eats, the system measures the gases she exhales. Unlike respiration chambers—sealed rooms used in university research that require animals to be confined—GreenFeed collects data while cattle remain in their normal environment. This makes it practical to measure large numbers of cattle in feedlots, research herds, or pasture systems.

What Methane Data Tells You About Your Herd

Methane measurements provide a direct window into how efficiently individual cattle turn feed into pounds of calf. GreenFeed data can be used to evaluate feed additives or diet strategies designed to reduce methane loss, study genetic variation in methane production among animals, and identify cattle that convert more of their feed energy into production. Because methane production is heritable, enough to make measurable progress over a few generations of selection, researchers are working to incorporate emissions traits into breeding programs. As more methane data is collected across enough animals, it could eventually feed into EPD (Expected Progeny Difference) programs, giving producers a tool to select for energy efficiency the same way they select for growth, calving ease, or marbling today.

The Data Behind Better Genetics

One of the most promising applications of these tools is in genetic selection. By collecting large datasets on feed intake, growth, and methane production, researchers can identify animals with desirable traits and incorporate them into breeding programs. This is the phenotype behind the EPD—the actual measurement data that makes genetic predictions Accurate. EPDs are only as good as the measurements behind them, and until recently, traits like individual feed intake and methane production couldn’t be measured on enough animals in commercial settings to build reliable predictions. SmartFeed and GreenFeed are changing that. Selecting cattle that require less feed for the same production, maintain strong growth and reproductive performance, and produce lower methane emissions per unit of product creates long-term improvements that accumulate across generations. Unlike a management intervention that has to be repeated every year, genetic improvement is permanent and cumulative. Every generation builds on the last.

Practical Benefits for Cow-Calf Producers

While many of these tools started in research settings, they’re now being used by commercial operations looking for an edge on feed cost and genetic decisions.

For cow-calf producers, the data can help in five key areas:

1. Improve Replacement Female Selection

Which heifers to keep is one of the most consequential decisions a cow-calf producer makes. SmartFeed data shows you which heifers are doing the most with the least—the ones that will lower your annual cow cost for years to come.

2. Evaluate Nutrition Programs

Monitoring supplement intake alongside weight gain tells you whether your feeding strategy is actually delivering results across the Herd, not just on average.

3. Improve Breeding Decisions

Efficiency and emissions data can help producers evaluate sires based on daughter performance—not just catalog EPDs, but actual measured intake and gain on the daughters those bulls produce.

4. Reduce Feed Costs

Even small improvements in feed efficiency produce meaningful savings across a herd, especially over a multi-year selection program.

5. Recover Lost Energy

Methane emissions represent a 6–10% loss of total feed energy. Selecting for lower-emission cattle keeps more of the energy you’re paying for working inside the animal. In an era when every cow on the place matters more than she has in decades, the operations that measure, select, and improve will be the ones still standing when the cycle turns. The data to do it is available today.