New Beef Cattle Specialist Joins MSU Extension

Sep 03, 2025

By Susan Collins-Smith

Genevieve D’Souza joined the Mississippi State University Extension Service May 1 as a beef cattle specialist.

D’Souza, a native of Texas, brings her experience in ruminant nutrition to cattle producers in the central region as well as statewide. She is based at the Brown Loam branch of the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station in Raymond where she also conducts research.

Her Extension educational programs and research will focus on improving cattle nutrition for pasture-raised cattle and other cattle production systems, including stockering and backgrounding.

“My goal is to help Mississippi cattle producers be more competitive in local and national markets. My plans are to investigate how producers can utilize their locally available resources, like forages and commodity products, to help them continue to grow healthy, safe and nutritious beef cattle,” said D’Souza, who is also an assistant professor in the MSU Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences.

Source : msstate.edu

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.