Harrison County has a large number of cattle producers with more and more young and/ or new producers coming on board. This is due in part to a lot of our larger farms selling into smaller farms as well as many new faces moving into our county from other states. Several of them have never had cattle before or are wanting to expand their current operations by adding cattle. With this surge in newer producers, we thought offering the Master Cattleman program would be very beneficial to our producers to learn more about the cattle industry and how they can succeed as well as building relationships with others in their county with similar interests.

Harrison, Bourbon and Nicholas Counties teamed up together to offer the Master Cattleman program to 38 individuals with 33 of them graduating and becoming Master Cattleman. This program was very beneficial to each producer and all producers said that they learned something new that they can take back to their operation to hopefully improve it. There were several first time Extension “users” that chose to be a part of this program and since then have been back into our offices for other resources.

The Master Cattleman program was offered by the UK Beef Extension Team and was a total of 6 educational sessions each lasting approximately 3 hours. We held 2 sessions in each of our counties where the participants would meet together, learn and share a meal. It was the first time in many years that the Master Cattleman program was held in any of our counties and it was very well received and we look forward to offering the program to our clients again whenever it is offered again.