By Sharla Adams

What are your favorite web sites on the Internet and what type of information do you look for?

Steve Sims
Tri-State Cattle Feeders
Hereford, Texas

I'm not real partial to the Internet, but a few sites garner my daily attention: the CME, CBOT and several USDA daily reports. Occasionally, I look at the "Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page" or the "Voice for a Viable Future" site. As good as it is to know what your friendly industry is doing, it's just as good to know what the unfriendly folks are thinking.

I also use the Internet to correspond with customers and friends, check flights and gather data on items of interest to our business. We also have a site for Tri-State Cattle Feeders. My favorite search engine is MetaCrawler, a combination of several engines. Here are those web site addresses:

www.cme.com
www.cbot.com
www.weather.com
www.cyber-dyne.com/~tom
www.metacrawler.com
www.simskirk.com

Jim McDaniel
Chiangus breeder
Hillsboro, Texas

Web sites most helpful to me are the ones that inform me in all matters related to producing a better product for the beef consumer to purchase. We need to have more consistent quality and better taste to improve market share for beef.

Jorge Camargo
Rancher/software company owner
Monterrey, Mexico

I have 2 cattle ranches in Tamaulipas, Mexico, 8 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico. On the Internet, I try to find some web sites related to feeding livestock the original way--with grass. I have not yet found a really good web site with this kind of information. The topic that has a high interest for me is a site where you can sell and buy livestock through the Internet.

Or at least generate contact, because it's very difficult in Mexico to find a way to make direct contact between the buyer and seller of cattle. We are building a web site related to this topic, and I would like to receive your opinion on this. Some of the sites that I visit are:

www.weather.com
www.ansi.okstate.edu/library

Brian Cummins
Commercial producer
Canton, Texas

My favorite web site is Bovo-links. This site has links to a good many beef association home pages, universities, market information and other ag-related sites. The location is:

www.heatwatch.com/html/bovo-links.htm

Peter McBride
Commercial/stocker operator
Mission, Texas

Web sites that I check on a regular (daily) basis are the Wall Street Journal--by subscription but cheaper than the print edition--the New York Times and Texas Livestock Market News Reports at:

www.ams.usda.gov/lsg/mncs/ls_amar.htm

Sites that I use but not daily:

www.thecattlemanmagazine.com
www.livestockweekly.com

I often do public speaking about the cattle business. A good source of national statistics and up-to-date graphs that can be downloaded and printed comes from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service at:

www.usda.gov/nass/aggraphs/graphics.htm

Also good for background information is the NCBA site at:

www.ncanet.org

To find just about any newspaper in the world, visit the American Journalism Review site at:

www.newslink.org/new.html