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From the way businesses are talking these days, the cloud is where it’s at. To be sure, cloud computing has certainly helped companies find new benefits that improve productivity, increase capabilities, and cut down on operational costs. Simply saying that businesses need to adopt the cloud, however, would be oversimplifying things. Moving to the cloud is no simple matter, especially when talking about small businesses. The challenge of adopting the cloud still won’t stop most smaller organizations. In fact, recent research predicts that 78 percent of small businesses will have made a full move to the cloud by 2023. The real question is whether small businesses will be able to make that move successfully. Smaller companies can increase the chances of cloud adoption success if they follow a number of simple steps.
1. Learn About Cloud Capabilities and Business NeedsGetting to understand the cloud is the first important step every small business should take. Small business owners need to know what the cloud’s capabilities are and how it can impact a company. At the same time, small companies need to identify areas in their own organization where the cloud can benefit them the most. Blindly moving to the cloud without fully understanding how it works can create numerous problems down the line. Identifying an end goal of how to use cloud computing should be a high priority.
2. Place Value on SimplicityEnacting any new strategy usually comes with a degree of risk. The same is true of the cloud, and just like with any new technology, one should try to keep things simple at first. Cloud computing provides an open, scalable environment for businesses to use, but small businesses that are new to the cloud shouldn’t begin by installing a complex cloud architecture. Start simple and gain valuable experience before ratcheting up cloud use.
3. Outline an Organizational VisionChange can be frightening, especially for a small business. Any time a new strategy is implemented, there will likely be many employees unsure if it’s the right thing to do. That’s why small businesses need to clearly explain why they’re adopting the cloud. Breaking down the benefits of cloud computing department by department, both on a large and small scale, can help employees understand why the change is happening and what they stand to gain from it.
4. Choose Public, Private, or HybridOnce a small business knows it wants to adopt the cloud, it then has to make the decision between using a public, private, or hybrid cloud. Each option comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Public clouds, for example, are generally more affordable, but they can come with greater security risks. Private clouds, on the other hand, are more customizable but cost more.
5. Learn From Others’ ExperiencesKeeping in touch with other similar organizations can help small businesses learn about how they adopted the cloud. Other companies can offer valuable insight on the best strategies to take when implementing cloud solutions as well as the pitfalls to avoid. Small businesses can also get an insider perspective on how to deal with cloud vendors’ differing pricing structures, features, and security capabilities.
6. Evaluate Multiple Cloud VendorsPicking the right cloud provider is a crucial decision, one that shouldn’t be made lightly. When it comes time to investigate a cloud vendor, a small business needs to be thorough by speaking to multiple ones to find the best fit. Small businesses also need to find out as much information as they can about each provider. Ask hard hitting questions. Ask about pricing and reliability. Know how they would handle a security breach. A good vendor should be able to provide statistics on its performance and capabilities.
With that right strategy and plan, small businesses can feel confident knowing they’ll make the transition to the cloud relatively painless. Challenges will likely crop up along the way, but as long as an organization is prepared to adapt over the time, they should be able to make full use of all the possibilities and benefits of cloud computing. Over time, they’ll likely become experts themselves and be ready to adopt even more complex technologies.
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Hybrid Cloud Adoption Strategy For Cio
The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from US$44.6 billion in 2023 to US$97.6 billion by 2023. Overview of Hybrid Cloud
Today, business is changing continuously and technology is trying to catch up with these business agilities to meet to the time to market. Organizations are expanding their usage of cloud to maintain their competitive edge, accelerate the innovation and transform interactions with customers, employees and partners. The Pandemic has further increased the demand for speed of delivery and scale of cloud adoption.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), “By 2023, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.”
Markets and Markets research quoted that, “the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from US$44.6 billion in 2023 to US$97.6 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period.”
CIOs across the industries are busy working with multiple cloud providers, essentially to retain what works and what to improve across Organization’s Cloud estate. One of the fundamental decisions they need to make is how to balance the on-site, remote, public and private elements of that combination. CIO’s need to derive a strategy to adopt emerging technologies to provide more business value than before.
In addition, the CIO’s security concerns regarding adoption of public cloud providers are going down while the concerns regarding Vendor lock-in are trending up. The organizations does not want to put all its eggs in one cloud provider’s basket, to minimize the huge dependency.
The major factors that CIO’s need to consider before promoting Hybrid Cloud model across the organization
are,
Do Organization has a right business culture to embrace rapid change
What value the Hybrid Cloud bring to Organization business
Will it help organization to lower costs, improve processes and better manage security
Organization readiness for New Service Model
Organization capability to address change management in moving to a hybrid cloud adoption while maintaining business continuity
Do organization has proper use cases for hybrid cloud adoption. For ex: usage of packaged applications, disaster recovery setup across the multiple geographies etc.
Volume of requirement for new application development on existing architectures, development of next generation applications
Hybrid Cloud addresses all the above CIO’s concerns. Hybrid cloud is one of the quick solution to address Agility and Speed in terms of choosing the right workload for the right environment.
Hybrid cloud is not a product or software service. It is an approach to cloud computing that includes a combination of private cloud, public cloud and/or on-premise environment. The combination may include infrastructure, virtualization, bare-metal servers and/or containers.
Key Considerations for Adoption of Hybrid CloudHybrid Cloud plays a key role in increasing speed of delivery of IT resources to end-users, improve disaster recovery capabilities and for better resource utilization. Some of the key considerations for the Hybrid cloud adoption are,
Visibility of Current State: Assess the current application landscape and infrastructure across the organization to decide on the cloud migration. Complete application portfolio analysis of the Organization need to perform to decide on the cloud adoption.
Rate of Cloud adoption: Big bang approach is not going to fly. Based on the criticality of the applications the decision on the movement on the cloud Vs timelines need to be decided. The factors that decide on the rate of cloud adoption are, complexity of the application, data requirements, regulatory and compliance needs, modernization prerequisites, cost implications, real time requirements etc.
Portfolio Rationalization: Identify the business functions and the applications that are catering to these business capabilities. Re-engineer these business functions based on industry trends and Merger/acquisitions. Identify the redundant functionality across the applications and rationalize them before moving on to the Hybrid cloud.
Application Migration: Applications can be migrated “To and from” the data center and cloud using Hybrid Cloud model. Identify the applications that need to remain on-premise, or move to private or public cloud. This migration can be temporary or permanent depending on the enterprise strategy of migration.
Nature of Applications: Applications that change frequently need to be move to cloud to leverage automated deployment through adoption of DevOps. Applications that handle sensitive data to be best retained on premise. Applications with very high scalability requirements because of varied user load seasonal or timely are ideal to be hosted on the public/private cloud
Selection of Environments: Public cloud environments are cloud service providers may not provide the specialized hardware/application components and thus not a viable option to move the application to cloud. The core idea is to choose the best environment for the application to run to deliver the functionality at the most optimal cost and effort
Integration Strategy: Need for connecting back the applications to historical data that resides on the on-premise servers still exist, even though the migration to cloud happens. Various diverse integration patterns emerge as part of the modernizing the applications, handing multitude data sources covering structured and unstructured data. All these activities demand the refinement of integration strategy to be follow by the Hybrid cloud across the Organization.
Regulatory Requirements: Applications requiring regulatory and compliance requirements demand some of the applications/data to reside on premise. This requires deeper due diligence to select the right candidates for Hybrid cloud and the right hosting option for the application.
Containerization: Containerizing the applications would help in making the application cloud agnostic and move across public, private, and on-premises clouds. Containers and Microservices go together like Idly and Sambar, if we prepare wisely. Microservices and containerization of these services deployed under hybrid cloud environment.
Cloud interoperability: Integration between several cloud offerings across multiple cloud service providers and cloud types is the key consideration for the success of the hybrid multi cloud adoption
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud AdoptionHybrid Cloud helps the Organization with increased flexibility to deliver IT resources, improved disaster recovery capabilities and lower IT capital expenses. The other benefits to the Organization are,
Business Acceleration: helps in Speed up business processes, support collaboration, and provide cost-effective solutions to free up IT budget for innovative, revenue-generating projects
Cost Reduction: helps in reducing operating and capital costs and improves performance, productivity and business agility via a flexible, scalable solution. Organizations can choose the applications to move across the clouds and on premise based on their organization requirements
Reliability: in this model, if one cloud goes down, some functionality will still be available to users from the other deployed clouds. Generally, one public cloud could be used as backup to another cloud
Risk Management : helps in mitigating risk with a single, unified, cybersecurity solution
Manage Legacy Systems : Rather than replacing legacy systems, hybrid Cloud can bridge the gap between legacy and new, providing major cost savings
Scalability: Applications can scale infinitely through adopting a hybrid multi cloud strategy while keeping the core of the business & data secure through on-premises hosting
ConclusionHybrid cloud adoption helps the Organization to lower the infrastructure footprint, improves security, increase resilience, zero down time and acceleration in Time to Market.
Therefore, Hybrid cloud is not just about delivering cost savings. It is about the Organization becoming more agile, efficient and productive. Organizations of any size can adopt Hybrid cloud that helps in cost efficient delivery of the business.
AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Vijayasimha A & Raju Alluri of Wipro Digital Architecture Practice of Wipro Ltd for giving the required time and support in many ways in bringing up this article.
AuthorDr.Gopala Krishna Behara is a Distinguished Member and Lead Enterprise Architect in Wipro Technologies with 25+ years of extensive experience in the ICT industry. He serves as an Advisory Architect, Mentor on Enterprise Architecture, Application Modernization and continues to work as a Subject Matter Expert and Author. He is certified in Open Group TOGAF, AWS Solution Architect -Associate, IBM Cloud Solutions and UNPAN. Published number of research papers, books in IT industry. He has been a speaker at National and International forums and bodies like The Open Group, National e-Governance Forum. He has been a moderator and panel member for multiple technical/business forums like IGI Global, AEA, Open Group and Premium College meets. Recipient of EA Hall of Fame International Award – Individual Leadership in EA Practice, Promotion and Professionalization Award.
DisclaimerUsing Social Media: The Small Business Experience
I’m hoping to offer some insight into how a small but growing and ambitious multi-channel retailer intends to use social media to promote our online brand, The Emporium Direct – I am by no means an expert in social media nor is my organisation’s present social media activity up there in comparison to the big brands. But I do run our marketing, therefore I can share hands-on experience on what has worked for us and what we’re planning.
Before I get to how we’re using social media, here is a brief snapshot of our organisation.
Company BackgroundWe have a large High Street store in Maldon, Essex and a growing e-commerce business, The Emporium Direct. Like many, we originally started trading on eBay, then moved onto Amazon and eventually our own website.
Marketplace tips
Our success has been down to the following:
Selling a mixture of niche, general and branded products – this allows us to enter multiple markets, gain additional traffic and custom all year round as opposed to only certain times of the year
Having multiple marketplace accounts – the internet is an ever-expanding net therefore the more stores and/or products you have floating out there the more likely you will sell
Aspiring to the highest standard of customer service – just because you sell online does not mean customer service should waiver – maintain excellent customer at all times
Trading in retail for over 25 years, we have a wealth of experience, contacts and know-how and we apply this to our e-commerce business
Despite being fairly successful on our marketplace accounts, it is increasingly clear that unless you are a large, well-known brand coupled with equally large resources, selling and converting sales online through your own direct website is no easy task. However, it is a great challenge and one we plan to get to grips with after the busy Christmas trading period.
Why Social Media?I think it is fair to say that unless you have been hiding for the last few years, the social media revolution is here to stay and is not a force any reputable business can ignore. We want to use social media to give our brand more personality, to engage more with customers, to create open dialogue with them and promote our business as well other local businesses near us. Facebook in particular is great for this.
One suggestion of ours is to start including more images and videos of key areas of interest in the historic, market town of Maldon, Essex which is situated on the Blackwater estuary and surrounded by beautiful countryside with myriad places of interest. Some might argue that doing this is a waste of time and money. However, and as stated above, we are not using social media to bombard customers with products, it is more about engagement, community and giving our brand the personality we know it has.
Another point to consider (I read the post on Smart Insights and similar here) is that search engines are now using social media activity as a ranking factor therefore once again, creating relevant useful content becomes increasingly important.
My final point, and similar to the other guests’ posts regarding the travel industry, is that the retail industry is also going through a revolution. The worst trading conditions for many years, if not ever, coupled with the internet, have transformed the entire business environment.
Using social media is a great way for businesses, particularly SME’s, to engage with customers and promote their brand at minimal costs. Although the costs may be minimal (free to setup social media accounts and only time to update them), we believe the strategy and use of social media are only worth our investment providing we adhere to the following methods:
Create a community allowing open dialogue between our business and customers
Provide useful content such as: photos and videos of our business and the surrounding area, product reviews, customer reviews, business opinions and any other information useful to our business and customers
Avoid pushy sales onto people – we believe social media is a place where people want to be totally honest with one another and do not want to be bombarded with commercialism
The following are our main social media priorities in the coming year:
Facebook page: We have started adding photos of Maldon and the surrounding area and are promoting our High Street, business partners and anything else related to this lovely area. We would also like to run campaigns on here too. Our Facebook page is more for community, open dialogue and genuine interaction, not sales bombardment. We have Facebook profiles ourselves so respect the fact not many people want to be always bothered.
Foursquare: As the web transitions into web 3.0, we believe we need to look at location marketing. Foursquare is perfect for this as it allows users to discuss, tag and share our businesses content directly to their phone. For example, we could run a campaign whereby the first person to check-in at our High Street store through their mobile device receives a discount, a free product or voucher for use in one of town’s lovely coffee shops and cafes. There are numerous ways marketers can promote their business and engage with fans but it is essential that as a business we look into this now so we can gain experience in this new area of digital marketing.
Twitter: We will use Twitter for relevant updates and links to our content. The popularity of Twitter indicates that we cannot ignore this social media powerhouse even though the two above appear more commercially useful at present.
LinkedIn: We will use LinkedIn to create a professional profile for our business and make relevant updates when necessary.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite is the excellent software that allows digital marketers to manage and populate these channels since this gives a single place to update the profiles with analytics. And it’s free!
ConclusionI am definitely not an expert on social media marketing. However, from the little experience I do have, I believe businesses should provide relevant and useful content to users but not with the sole intention of trying to gain sales. Using this approach, you can help shape your brands’ personality, engage and interact with customers, give your business a fantastic public relations platform and also improve your website search engine results position.
How To Save Money On Small Business Insurance
Proactively insuring your business typically costs much less than the cost of replacing assets and lost revenue when an unexpected problem occurs and you are uninsured.
Do your research before you purchase small business insurance — this includes looking at your needs and resources as well as consulting with experts.
Think of your relationship with your insurance agent or broker as a long-term partnership rather than a transaction.
This article is for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking for guidance on choosing the right kinds of insurance coverage to protect their businesses and themselves.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Risk is an inherent part of business ownership, a reality for every small business and solo entrepreneur. Even though it may be unpleasant to think about, you need to account for that danger and plan how to handle any future issues. A business insurance policy is the best way for an entrepreneur or owner of a small business to plan for and mitigate some of the risks that come with its day-to-day operations.
How to save money on small business insuranceApproach selecting business insurance the same way you’d address any problem or challenge in your operation — do your research. By assessing your needs, considering your options, looking at your current resources and consulting subject matter experts, you’ll be prepared to select the best small business insurance for your business.
1. Know what you need.Every business has its unique risks and, therefore, unique insurance needs. Do your homework to select and purchase the coverage your business needs without paying for what you don’t require. Start with the basics. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), companies with employees are legally required to have workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and, in some locations, disability insurance.
After you’ve covered your business’s legally required basics for your employees, general liability insurance is a good place to start. This covers any third-party damages your business may incur — property damage, injuries or incidents that occur on your premises, certain legal defense costs if your company is sued, and reputational damage due to libel, slander or copyright infringement.
Check to see if you qualify for a business owner’s policy (BOP) under the insurance carrier’s terms and conditions. A BOP will cover your business property in addition to general liability, which makes it a better overall deal.
“Generally, a BOP policy will offer more coverage for less money than the mono-line general liability policy,” said Jennifer Rasiah, founder of Givesurance, a company that allows members to donate 5 percent of their insurance premiums to charity.
Olavo Macedo Jr., senior managing director of mergers and acquisitions for insurance brokerage firm Risk Strategies Co., said that hired and non-owned automobile coverage is also a good idea if it’s not already part of your BOP. He also recommended cyber insurance, since data security is a top priority for more and more businesses.
“Cyber liability coverage … has become a necessity as many businesses utilize online platforms to transact business, and the collection, management, and protection of client data creates a huge risk,” Macedo said.
Key Takeaway
Small businesses in the same industry or market may seem similar, but each one is unique. That includes what kinds of insurance coverage they need.
Tip
Did you know that many small business insurance carriers offer discounts to customers that hold multiple policies? The same way you can receive a reduction for bundling home, life and auto insurance with one carrier in your personal life, you may be eligible for a discount on multiple business insurance policies when you use the same carrier.
Why choosing the right small business insurance is importantHope for the best and plan for the worst. Small businesses are lean operations with limited cash flow and assets. Business owners and entrepreneurs must choose the right small business insurance that meets their needs to protect them from unexpected problems.
Small businesses also need to protect their profits and cash reserves. Spending money today on unnecessary insurance is not just a waste of capital — it comes with opportunity costs. The cash you spend on an irrelevant insurance policy could have been used to repair equipment, purchase supplies, expand your distribution or marketing, or upgrade your materials.
Benefits of small business insuranceSmall business insurance protects your business operations and helps you achieve your long-term business goals. Insurance deductibles and premiums typically represent lower out-of-pocket expenses that you can plan for, as opposed to the high cost of replacing or repairing business assets and lost revenue without small business insurance.
Assess your needs, do your research, and build a relationship with your insurance agent or broker to protect your business and your business goals.
Leslie Pankowski contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.
How 5G Will Accelerate Cloud Business Investment
Cloud computing will experience a major shift with 5G. The fifth-generation (5G), which was discussed at the Mobile World Congress in February, was a major topic of discussion.
5G will revolutionize the communications and network industry with its ultra-fast transmission speeds that can be 100x faster than 4G.
Already, the first 5G smartphone commercials are scheduled to be released in the first half of this year. Ericsson Mobility’s recent report predicted that there would be nearly 20% more 5G subscribers by 2023.
Many industries will reap the benefits of 5G’s capabilities. 5G’s features will change the landscape in many industries, including the healthcare and automotive industries, as well as smart homes and smart cities.
Cloud services will become more important as there are more potential industries. Wearable devices, which lack sufficient internal storage and rely on larger, synced devices like smartphones for data, will be able to function independently using 5G’s low-to-zero latency.
Businesses have many options because of the communication potential. For example, IBM and Vodafone recently inked a B2B (Business-to-Business) deal aimed at cloud hosting, along with another part providing solutions in a number of areas including IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and other 5G-beneficial applications.
Also read: 10 Best Saas Marketing Tools And Platforms For 2023
5G’s impact on other technological innovationsCombining 5G with cloud technologies will enhance the functionality and flexibility of many industries, particularly cloud businesses.
Combining 5G and cloud technologies will enable network carriers to offer services that are comparable to those offered by non-cellular IoT network providers.
Streaming data, analytics:The existing Big Data processing technology uses cloud infrastructure for storage. However, streaming analytics on Big Data is still difficult due to the latency of current wireless networks. Real-time streaming problems will be greatly reduced, as 5G networks are reportedly surprisingly fast.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT):For valuable insights in managing cost and efficiency, it is essential to process and analyze massive amounts of sensor data in real-time for industrial applications, such as supply chain management or manufacturing. Given the variable and remote nature of these tasks, 5G could reduce the cost of Big Data analysis.
Edge computing:Also read: 10 Business-Critical Digital Marketing Trends For 2023
Natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI):As more companies use AI and NLP, it is essential that they can process and manage large amounts of data.
Cloud computing service providers are equipped with the storage and computers necessary, but they need to increase their data ingestion capabilities. 5G will allow for the necessary data transmission to enable AI- and NLP-based applications to function effectively.
AR and VR:5G will significantly improve the quality of VR/AR applications and bring innovations to industries like retail, healthcare, and travel.
The above-mentioned areas will see significant technology adoption as 5G and its applications develop. These areas require complex and large-scale computing, which makes cloud computing an essential component. Although 5G is still a distant possibility, it’s not as far off as we think.
The 3GPP Release 15 standards, which are the next-generation network’s standard for 5G devices, classify them as non-standalone.
Also read: Top 10 Trending Technologies You should know about it for Future Days
What will 5G mean for cloud services?Mobile cloud applications are used by organizations today both from an operational and customer service perspective. After the widespread rollout of 5G technology, mobile cloud applications will become more widely available and more efficient.
Businesses will benefit from 5G’s increased speed and reliability for unified communications services. Mobile apps used every day are cloud-dependent, which will be improved by 5G’s low latency capabilities.
This will allow for faster transfers and provide more benefits than the 4G network. These poor performances can cause applications to be intentionally light or limit their potential during development.
Applications will be able to realize their full potentials with 5G’s improved cloud availability. This is without any new ideas being lost. Cloud communications offer many benefits, whose main features will be enhanced by 5G.
Cloud service providers can reach mobile enterprise customers quickly and reliably using 5G technology. Because of 5G’s larger computing capacity and machine-to-machine communication, virtual machines will be easier to access via smartphones.
Also read: 7 Best Woocommerce Plugins to boost your Store you must know
Last wordsThe cloud computing industry will see major improvements with 5G technology. Because most technological innovations are more efficient when cloud-dependent, this is why 5G technology will make it possible to improve the efficiency of cloud computing. With its low latency and smooth communication, 5G improves this integration.
This space has many applications that can be used in various industries. The cloud can be used for non-device storage.
These innovations will perform better if they are made use of the cloud via 5G connections. Cloud-based services and products will be more reliable, quicker, and more efficient. These innovations will in turn accelerate cloud business investment.
How To Cull Cattle: 6 Steps (With Pictures)
Body Condition and weight gain: If a bovine in your herd is not able to gain weight efficiently on pasture alone, or gain weight after calving while nursing a calf and going into winter feeding, she should be shipped.
Cows that come up open during preg-checking, are late calvers or late breeders should be culled. Bulls that are infertile or cannot settle all the cows he’s been exposed to should be culled. Often health and nutrition are factors affecting the fertility of your cow herd, and you may have to look at that as well if a lot of your cows are coming up open.
Some cows can be too old to calve out or even raise a calf. This is apparent when their teeth have been worn down to the gums, when they have poorer fertility than the rest of the herd, or are generally not as productive and thrifty as they used to be.
Good conformation in cattle is necessary if you are to keep a good, high producing cow herd. Cows must have good feet and udders, maintaining the depth in their ribs and rumps, and be overall as feminine as their breeding allows. Bulls must have great feet and legs, good scrotal conformation, good depth in the ribs and rump and have good masculinity and muscling. Replacement heifers should be growthier than other calves and have good conformation like their dams if they are to be retained. Any bovine in your herd that does not meet any of the criteria mentioned in the conformation article link above, they should be culled.
Temperament is just as crucial as fertility and conformation in your cow herd. You should not be allowing any wild or unruly cows to be kept in your herd, as they are often dangerous to you, and can even stir up an unnecessary fuss in the herd. Any cows that are crazy, not docile, overly protective or aggressive towards you, or try to run to the hills whenever you’re out checking cows should be culled. Any bull that challenges you and does not respect you (often when they’ve come to realize they’re bigger and stronger and more intimidating than you) should be shipped ASAP.
You may have some cattle that are just too wild to be put in the trailer. It may be more humane to put them down in the pasture and butcher them for the freezer right there. It’ll save the headache and stress of forcing them to get in the trailer.
There is a longer list for any potential health issues that will make you consider culling some cows from your herd. You may be the kind of producer that doesn’t want to spend the money on vet medicine to treat a sick cow, bull or calf, and may choose to put them down instead. However, you may be the kind of producer that will try to treat a sick bovine, only to find their fertility has decreased, or they are chronically ill. Some diseases, like Johne’s disease, are simply untreatable, and you will have to not only cull the cow with Johne’s, but all her daughters and sons from your herd. Some animals you will find may be carriers for a genetic defect that is affecting your calf crop, and you may have to cull those as well. Mastitis in a dairy cow will often reduce her milk productivity, and she will be culled as well.
Any bovines that have prolapsed, have pink-eye or cancer eye, have sunburnt or frost bitten udders or testicles, or consistently have been difficult with calving, must be culled.
Please see your local large animal veterinarian for any information on diseases you will need to keep an eye out for in your cow herd.
Selling your year’s calf crop is another form of culling, though this is really a result of your year’s work of keeping the cow herd in top condition and quality. If you choose to keep your calves back for a while, remember you are doubling your herd size if you do so, and need more pasture and/or feed to keep these calves for an extra few months or even a year (if necessary). It’s highly recommended, if you are primarily a cow-calf producer and not a cow-yearling producer, to sell your calves right after they’ve been weaned.
When deemed necessary, separate those animals that are on your cull list into a separate pen or corral from the rest of the herd using calm herding practices. The top priority animals that should be culled out of the herd sooner (if possible) are those with bad temperament issues and/or health issues. Some animals with bad health issues can be kept back particularly if you are willing and able to treat them back to health. Other animals with health issues that cannot be treated and should be culled as soon as possible. When it comes to bad temperamental issues, however, it is highly recommended that you get rid of these animals right away. If you are working alone, you will need to call someone to help you separate the bad animal from the herd, or wait until you can sell your other culls to separate that animal with the other culls.
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Phone the auction barn and go load them up into a stock trailer. It’s best if you separate your cattle into different groups before you haul them to the auction mart. For example, you may only have one cow with health issues, one bad tempered bull, and five cows that are too old to continue being production or bad conformation, and the rest of your culls are weaned calves you are intent on selling, but it’s a good idea to load your cows and/or bulls together in one load, then your weaned calves in a separate load.
Back up to the stockyard entrance where you can unload your culls, then go to the office and pick up your bill. Your animals will be weighed first before you get the bill of sale, and how much your animals sell for goes according to what the current prices are for each type and size of animal.
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