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Bale Grazing Revisited

Northern Rancher said:
Lone Cowboy I've just come to embrace my laziness instead of trying to defend and hide it. It's not an exact science by any means for sure-as for Haymaker anybody who won't hunt deer in plus 28F because it's too cold shouldn't really be preaching common sense to a rancher whose just gone through a weel of -35 with a good chance we might get three more months of it. We run all our cows in a group-I don't know if you noticed but the calves are still on there's 425 head in that group and they are eating $210 worth of hay a day-work the math however you like it. Denny I just set them bales on end because the netwrap is easier to get off that way lol-pure sciencve at it's best. Well I'm off to coach hockey till Monday see you then.
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Northern rancher,I think you just proved my point about common sense,if it relates to weather,it's 28 degrees out side this morning wind howlin,sleet mixed with snow,Im in here by the fireplace,the weather folks are saying 57 clear degrees with no wind this evening,are you starting to get the picture ?
I have to back up a tad on my previous statements about this so called "bale feeding" years ago it come a helluva flood in the spring,rained day and nite,we wound up with 55 inches of rain that year,there was hay every where,could'nt give it away......That's the year we did alot of "bale feeding" LOL worked pretty good :D :D :D ...........good luck
PS if you got a tractor you better hide the dam thang after the way you chastised me about mine.
 
Right now, we're grazing the cows on a field we seeded to alfalfa and meadow brome, with oats/barley mixed as a cover crop. We left it all standing, and now that there's enough snow cover to keep them from getting down to the alfalfa, we let 'em at it. They're happier'n a tornado in a trailer park!

Once that's cleaned up(hopefully no sooner than Christmas), we'll start bale-grazing. Our will be much like Northern's setup. Bales in rows, 2-cow lengths apart. That way, it keeps your manure pack spread evenly over the meadows/fields. We graze everyone together, because if some cows get weak, or are thinner, they just nominated themselves for early retirement in my books. Survival of the fittest to a certain extent.
 
<sigh> I tried bale grazing again this year, and I just can't afford to do it. My girls waste too danged much. :(

Hey NR, you want some of our snow? I'm feeding in a back pasture, and we've got enough now that I've gotta bust a path out there with the blade :mad:

Rod
 
My girls stay in the paddock, but they bed down on some of it, and once its covered in manure and urine, they won't eat it.

Just out of curiosity this year, I tried an experiment on a pen of 50 late pairs. For the first month of the year, I fed out 5 bales on the ground, spread over a small area. The girls would clean up all 5 in 2 days flat, bedding down on some of it. I then moved my hay save feeder out into the pasture, and fed 5 bales. I'm down to feeding every 3 days, and there is usually enough left in the feeder to do them at least another 1/4 day. I've switched back and forth a couple times, just to make up for weather, and my results are consistent. So that tells me that they're wasting 1 to 1.5 bales every 5 bales. I haven't recalculated how much it costs me per bale since I switched to the hard core baler, but as of 2 years ago, I was sitting at $7 per softcore bale. Just guesstimating this year, I think I'm sitting at $12 per hardcore bale. Thats $6 - $9 waste every day. I can easily run my loader on those kind of dollars, especially since I need to bed every couple days anyway.

I wish I could get away with it. It suits my lazy bone to a "T", and I agree with NR's idea of getting away with minimal equipment, however I just can't make it pencil :(

Rod
 
Always been interested in bale feeding and swath grazing.

I have wanted to try swath grazing, but since we start cutting by June 20 most years, I worry about the hay bleaching, wasting and rotting away before Winter.

Most times, if we end up getting hay rained on, and you can't get it dryed out quickly, you end up with streaks in the field the next year where the hay didn't come as good. Plus, we often get some nice rains in late Sept, early Oct, and things can rot pretty bad then.

How do you guys swath grazing work around that?

It seems like the bale grazing work better in the bigger herds. Little guys see it as wasting too much relative to their time and hay dollars, but guys with more cows see it as saving lots of time and headache. I can understand how there would be differences in the perceived value of the system relative to herd size.

A couple years I was lucky and found some big "STUR-D" feeders for a great price. I had two of the big ones and 40 head of cows. I could put out hay once a week(6 bales), and was selling liquid feed too, so I would check that liquid feed tub 3-4 days after feeding. That worked great, saw the cows only 2x per week during the Winter, and only once on my dollar! I worked with the mailman that delivered the mail on that route 3 days per week so got a nearly every day update anyway, LOL.

Our neighbor grinds feed into 2 small pastures. I think he grinds enough for 2 days at a time into each pasture, that way, he only starts the tractor every 4 days. Just grind the hay and that will pull the cows out of the previous pasture, then go grind hay into the other pasture, and close the gate. Come back 2 days later and open the gate into the 2nd pasture. The big pasture is 1/2 section or so, the small one is maybe 20 acres, and he feeds about 400 head that way.

We just have more feeders than we need, so we pt out enough hay for 2-3 days at a time so we don't have to start the tractor everyday. We also grind some poor quality hay with 2nd cutting alfalfa (hired done with big tub grinder), and feed a bunch of crap that way. For several years, it was a bunch of cheatgrass hay from a failed attempt at planting hay on what ended up being a dry year. They hay came the next year, but we baled a bunch of early cheatgrass hhay just to get rid of the problem. Ground that crap for 3 years before it was gone, and they liked it more every year.

Badlands
 
badlands most of the swath grazing is done with green feed oats or barley. They are seeded a little later and then they would be swathed generally in late August or early Sept. That way thet don't lay for to long and in this country some times we don't get much rain.
 
We are a little warmer here but I have seen swath grazing with millet/sudan grass but that gets risky as it is generally ready in late August so you can loose a lot of it in moisture... I am thinking maybe a fall oats crop would work better for us around here or just planting cereal rye and strip grazing... Was talking to one fella just north of here who actually was flying it in over his corn fields and bean field in late August and getting a real nice head start... Sounded a bit hit or miss and if you missed (Poor germination, wet harvest condistions) a lot expensive.. Most folks who do the rye thing plant if for early spring grazing....

I'm always willing to try something to save a few nickels as long as it isn't going to cost me a few dimes.
 
I don't bale graze - put up silage instead due to not being able to give up 2000 acres of cropland to grow hay on just to feed cows. If people are crazy enough to sell me hay for $40 /tonne delivered, maybe I will go that route. - definitly could not grow my own hay for cheaper. I heard from some guys that bale graze that they LEAVE the twine on the bales - slows down the hay injestion by the cows, makes them work for it a bit longer and cuts down on waste as the shape of the bale is kept longer. They then have a root rake wich they gather the strings with in the spring over a few days. :???:
 
P1010505.jpg


Here's what's left in the first paddock we grazed-not alot of waste.
 
I would think that it works better where you have temperature that stay below freezing, along with a good snow pack.

Last week, I was unrolling bales on the snow and it worked fine. The amount they wasted was far less than buying bedding for the girls.

This week, it is +5C. and our snow is almost all dissappeared into the mud that was underneath it when it came.

Cows are back in the barn and yard eating out of feeders.

And making lots of manure for us to move!
 
quess i wouldnt tip on the ends,they will unroll to easy and they will waste half of it by standing on it,when it falls down
 
Northern Rancher said:
Here's what's left in the first paddock we grazed-not alot of waste.
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Yeah, I got much more waste than that. I think I'm doing two things wrong though, having read a little more:

1) Putting bales on end, versus on their side.
2) Not putting the bales out on grass, but rather putting them out on top of the snow. It doesn't give the cows a reason to dig down or finish off the bale.

I've got a paddock that is in desperate need of fertilizer, so I'm going to give it a shot next year again, and correct what I think may be issues. What you have for waste in those pictures is perfectly acceptable. Not quite as clean as my hay saver feeders, but certainly clean enough to now make it pencil out.

Rod
 
Ohh those were put out with about a foot of snow on the ground. I don't think it really matters if they are on end or not. It's not as an exact science as people want to make it. Sometimes something very simple works very well. I'd get some bal,es and cows out on your paddock this winter-start at one end and work across it.
 
Thats what I did for the first two months of this winter in a different paddock. I had very heavy waste, so I went back to my hay saver feeders and simply moved them each feeding to spread the manure around. Wish I could take a picture of the waste for you, but its buried under snow. I had at least a foot of hay, spread in a 20 foot circle. 5 bales would feed the paddock for 2 days when feeding on the ground, but from the feeders 5 bales would last 3 days with a little left over.

Now we have 2 feet+ of snow in the paddocks so I moved them into the sheltered winter pasture anyway.

Rod
 
What I was concerned about was the pollution level of the left over hay. It was covered in manure and soaked with urine. Not really something I wanted to see my critters eating. They chose to bed down in the hay, versus the nearby straw pile.

Rod
 

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