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bale grazing pics

Guest, I am gaining access to the forage in 3 feet of snow. Also the forage freezes green and has not lost its nutrients thus locking them in. If it is a failure nutrient wise, (never has been yet) then there is still lots of energy there and the protein and other nutrients are cheap to add. The energy is the expensive part. Also the manure is out on the crop and does not need to be spread and I miss out on the baling, hauling and feeding part.
 
Grassfarmer said:
1) I'm not saying bale grazing is a bad system - just that I'm not convinced that the economics of it are as rosy as sometimes painted.

2) One cheaper way of improving litter Rod is to leave the damn baler at home! just let it grow and harvest direct it with cows.
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1) Perhaps not, but by the same token, you haven't bale grazed yet to determine the true costs. You're assuming that there will be greater waste, and what we who are actually using the system are saying is that there isn't much extra. Perhaps I haven't weighed the actual refuse left over, however the amount of time that it takes to consume feed is going to be a fairly accurate way of determing consumption and waste, especially since it was done over the course of an entire winter on the same group of cattle. Therefore consumption would be constant and the only variable could be waste. If bale grazing led to significantly more waste than bale rings, then the bales would have run out significantly quicker than they did when using rings.

I'm in cattle to make money, nothing more, nothing less. I don't really care about saving myself time, so if a system doesn't save me money or provide a cost saving benefit, it won't get used around here.

2) Great for you southern Albertans who don't see much snow. But how would I graze alfalfa thats sitting under 4 feet of snow? This year is an exception with only 10 inches of snow in the field, but generally I have a minimum of 2 feet of snow in the field by January. That would mean a pile of wasted feed. Plus winter killed alfalfa doesn't have the nutrient content of baled alafalfa. Besides, I'm talking about increasing litter on my pastures, which I don't bale anyway. As far as I can see, the only way to increase litter on my pastures is to let them grow up after grazing, then rot down with snow cover (waste), OR allow the cows to spread hay that I've baled and will bale every year otherwise its wasted.

Rod
 
Are you saying grassfarmer that the cost of enough bale feeders for 100 cows would only be $150 a year. BMR you mean you don't swath your carryover pasture-tsk tsk tsk-make sure you have a movie camera going while you do lol.
 
Rod, (and elwapo) I never mentioned swath grazing alfalfa I was talking grazing mixed perennial pastures.
The most effective way to increase litter on your pastures is to use high stock density during the grazing season. Let it grow up then obliterate it with short duration, huge stocking density.

NR, yes I think my $1.50/cow a year is reasonable. Spend $1500 on 4 feeders per 100 cows and expect to replace them after 10 years. Go really wild and spend $2000 on them and it still won't cost you more than $2 a year.
 
Grassfarmer said:
Rod, (and elwapo) I never mentioned swath grazing alfalfa I was talking grazing mixed perennial pastures.
The most effective way to increase litter on your pastures is to use high stock density during the grazing season. Let it grow up then obliterate it with short duration, huge stocking density.

NR, yes I think my $1.50/cow a year is reasonable. Spend $1500 on 4 feeders per 100 cows and expect to replace them after 10 years. Go really wild and spend $2000 on them and it still won't cost you more than $2 a year.
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Don't forget 50 cents a year for all the ear tags that get torn out.
 
Grassfarmer said:
The most effective way to increase litter on your pastures is to use high stock density during the grazing season. Let it grow up then obliterate it with short duration, huge stocking density.
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That doesn't come free either though. I'd need to cross-fence off smaller paddocks (currently I have 40 acres paddocks). I run groups of 55 head so I can ensure I know which sire belonged to which calf, so I'd have to run a paddock size of a couple acres or so for intensive grazing to really work well. That adds up to plenty of cost, and animal management during a time that I can't afford any extra time (haying season).

Besides, litter is "waste", no matter where it comes from. Yes, in the case of bale grazing, I've harvested that waste from one place and moved it over to another, a mechanical process that takes money, but not as much money as you seem to think it does.

Rod
 
In this day and age just about every rancher has a pickup of some kind. One step further would be to get a bale bed to put on that pickup. It could be any of several manufactured brands (Hydra-Bed, Dew-Eze, Bessler, Krogmann, Cannonball), or it could be a home-made deal that would work just as well.

"Usually" :wink: a pickup starts more easily on a cold morning than does a tractor. Usally a rancher makes the rounds on a cold winter day, anyway, to check water and break ice so the cattle can drink. Why not just roll out the correct number of bales to feed a bunch of cows at this time? There are quite a few advantages to doing it this way. There is very little waste of hay. No electric fencing needs to be messed with. A different area can be fed on each day which spreads the manure more evenly across a meadow or pasture. Another big advantage is that the cattle tend to "like" the hay provider and will follow the hay dispensing vehicle quite well, if they need to be moved.

We have not started a tractor all winter. Both Peach and I have one-ton pickups with Hydra-beds on them. Both pickups also have cakers mounted on the front of the bed. She can carry a thousand pounds of cake besides two 1500 pound bales of hay on her eight-foot bed. My pickup bed is eleven feet long, and the caker on it holds 1500 pounds of cake besides two 1500 pound bales of hay. If the snow gets deep we would probably need to use tractors but until then the Hydra-Beds work very well.
 
I have an ancient old dually with a deck on it-the problem with going out in our country and feeding every day to spread manure with a truck or a two wheel drive tractor is snow. You'll have to plow out trails and areas to feed on-most bale brazers set out bales in the fall or early winter then just have to open gates to get cattle from place to place. The big benefit is when you hit weather like the last month -it's only been above -35 windchill one day-is that an equipment failure won't leave you in a bind.
 
Each to their own and whatever you feels works on your own place under your management. In my opinion Rod the return on investment and time you would get by managing your summer pastures intensively would be many, many times what you will ever achieve by bale grazing. Spending time making hay is a $10 an hour activity whereas managing pasture intensively is a $100 an hour activity. I know which I prefer but as I said I'm not here to tell you your system is wrong and mine is right.

Soapweed, the research project I mentioned earlier in this thread used round bale unrollers and found 20% wastage. Again that was one research project in one set of weather conditions. As you say though trucks generally start easier than tractors in winter.
 
Imagine if you managed your summer pastures well and then fine tuned with strategically placed bale grazing. A ranch up here won the enviromental stewardship award does just that-they grow an amaqzing amount of grass.
 
NR, Imagine if you managed your summer pastures well and then fine tuned with strategically placed bale grazing .....using rings to achieve the same results as bale grazing only more economically. :wink:
 
Grassfarmer said:
Each to their own and whatever you feels works on your own place under your management. In my opinion Rod the return on investment and time you would get by managing your summer pastures intensively would be many, many times what you will ever achieve by bale grazing. Spending time making hay is a $10 an hour activity whereas managing pasture intensively is a $100 an hour activity. I know which I prefer but as I said I'm not here to tell you your system is wrong and mine is right.

Soapweed, the research project I mentioned earlier in this thread used round bale unrollers and found 20% wastage. Again that was one research project in one set of weather conditions. As you say though trucks generally start easier than tractors in winter.
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From my experience, less hay is wasted by rolling it out than in using bale rings. I am also quite sure that less hay would be wasted using rings than in just putting out the bales without protection. It just seems like unloading a whole truck load of bales and letting the cows "have at it" would be asking for lots of waste. For one thing, cows love to rub and play with the bales. They wreck more hay that way than they do by eating or defecating on it. I thought cows would act pretty much the same world wide, but maybe Canadian cows are more respectful and considerate than Sandhills cows.

The previous owner of the ranch where we now live did "swath grazing" way before it became fashionable. In the summer of 1984, he mowed and windrowed all of our present hay meadows. In those days there wasn't too much big round baling being done and most ranchers still stacked their hay loose. By leaving the hay in windrows, come winter time he turned the cattle into the windrowed hay. The cattle ate it but they didn't clean it up good. The following summer the meadows were just grazed. We bought the ranch in the spring of 1986 and resumed normal haying procedures. Every place where a windrow had layed and deteriorated came up into weeds. It took four or five years of normal haying before the weeds quit growing and normal grasses became re-established.
 
Do you know how much capital cost it would be to buy enough bale rings for a few hundred head of cattle to go on a weekly bale grazing rotation. We set up ours as a semiload per paddock- that's 34 x $400 if you can find feeders that aren't pieces of crap that cheap. Then there's the labour and tractor time to move them every time you go to a fresh set of bales. I fear my canny friend your jumpin' over dollars to save nickels. Bargain basement feeders are great for catching legs and hips not real good at saving feed.
 
Northern Rancher said:
Do you know how much capital cost it would be to buy enough bale rings for a few hundred head of cattle to go on a weekly bale grazing rotation. We set up ours as a semiload per paddock- that's 34 x $400 if you can find feeders that aren't pieces of crap that cheap. Then there's the labour and tractor time to move them every time you go to a fresh set of bales. I fear my canny friend your jumpin' over dollars to save nickels. Bargain basement feeders are great for catching legs and hips not real good at saving feed.
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I don't particularly like bale rings either, although we use two or three in our corrals. My point is that more hay is wasted in bale rings than in rolling it out, and more hay is wasted without rings than would be wasted with rings. We have nine bulls in a pasture. I don't even use a bale ring there, but just roll out a bale about once every ten days. They get to clean up all that hay before they get any more. If I was to just dump a bale out unattended with them, a third of it would probably get wasted.
 
Soapweed said:
It just seems like unloading a whole truck load of bales and letting the cows "have at it" would be asking for lots of waste. For one thing, cows love to rub and play with the bales. They wreck more hay that way than they do by eating or defecating on it. I thought cows would act pretty much the same world wide, but maybe Canadian cows are more respectful and considerate than Sandhills cows.
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Looking back on the thread, I don't think I mentioned that setting them out wastes less than bale rings, but rather I agreed I waste about 10% more than I did with bale rings. I guess what Grassfarmer and I are really debating is whether I'm saving enough in fuel/wear and tear on equipment to make up for that extra 10% wasteage, and I know that I am.

Oddly enough, if you set bales out and the cattle are used to seeing them around, they won't play with them much at all. Guess its like kids that get tired of a new toy. I see my bulls go out and give a bale a half hearted swipe every now and again, but otherwise they pretty much leave things alone.

Come spring, I'm going to fire up my digital camera and take some shots of my "waste". I think you guys with your bale rings will see there just isn't enough extra to panic over.

Grassfarmer, do you not ever have mud in the spring? If using hay rings, how would you deal with the grass being torn up which I _know_ happens? On my timothy pasture you can see exactly where I had the rings during my experiment. There isn't a stitch of timothy, but rather some lousy quackgrass.

In my area, I have 3 - 5 weeks of mud/soft soil before things firm up and grass starts to grow. The cattle need to be fed in this time, and thats when bale grazing really looks attractive as I don't need to be yarding a tractor through mud. That year that we had 4 and 5 feet of snow? I spent 3 weeks feeding with a front end loader and a 4 wheel drive tractor. Drive into the bale, lift it up, pull the tractor back with the 4WD. Hook forward, pull loader to where you wanted the bale. Repeat.

Wanna guess how much money that cost me? If I'd bales out on pasture to be readily grazed, I would have saved a thousand bucks. At 1 cent/lb for hay up here, I could have wasted a pile of hay and still made out ok.

Rod
 
Lousy quackgrass bite your tongue lol. As you bale graze longer and improve your fertility you'll find that 'duck hay' is the preferred grass. It's impossible to kill and will produce well with adequate nutrients. Quakgrass getting rootbound is a misnomer it's just suffering from not enough to grow on. Ranchers in this country were buying quackgrass seed from the messier farmers to seed pastiures with thirty years ago. Quakgrass paddocks are good to feed on during the muddier times it doiesn't hurt them a bit.
 
Northern Rancher said:
Lousy quackgrass bite your tongue lol. As you bale graze longer and improve your fertility you'll find that 'duck hay' is the preferred grass. It's impossible to kill and will produce well with adequate nutrients. Quakgrass getting rootbound is a misnomer it's just suffering from not enough to grow on.
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<chuckle> This will be one of those "I'll have to see it to believe it" things. I'm letting an alfalfa field go back to "native" grass (re: quackgrass) and we'll see how it produces against my meadow brome and crested wheatgrass pastures. Right now, its not impressive at all, but then my nitrogen content is well down from what it should be and quack is nitrogen hungry.

Time will tell on that one, and it'll be a few years before I'll know one way or the other.

On the root binding thing, I've talked to a variety of grass specialists over the years. Some have echoed your comments about quack only root binding when it runs low on nutrient, however others have told me that quack will "root bind" in wet soils. I live over a very large aquifer, and if I drill a post hole 4 feet down, most days it will have 6 inches of water laying in it by morning.

Rod
 
I guess we're under very different conditions Rod, we can go from two foot snow cover to dry inside a week in the spring. We are on a pretty sandy black loam here with a few pockets that are pure sand. Mud out in the pastures is not a problem although it can be around the corrals. That's why we like our cows out on pasture year round. We always set aside a drier pasture with a really good sod on it for that one wetter week in the spring when we transition from winter feeding to going back onto banked grass on some of the more productive lower lying land.

I'm with NR on the quack grass - "timothy" and "pasture" aren't two words that go together in my vocabulary. If I hadn't been using rings already and you had told me that I could convert timothy to quack grass by using them I'd have been out buying them tomorrow!
On our occasional sand hills that were almost blowing when I came here under timothy we now have a dense mat of quack grass that is surprisingly productive even in a dry year.
 
Not my concern whether any of you believe or don't believe, Guest. We are in the fifth day of a Chinook and the snow is disappearing faster than it came. Just imaging in your mind a decent stand cut with a 25 foot swather. It is already 1 and a half feet high. Lots of volume that once the cattle start down a row it is not difficult for them to proceed. I take what I see and hear here and try to use what I can and discard the rest. I would suggest if this model doesn't fit your paradigm you do the same. Next time there is that much snow and I am swath grazing I will most definitely take a photo. Until then feel free not to believe a word of it.
 

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