PureCountry said:
Those RFV numbers are amazing. That's better than alfalfa, isn't it?
It would be nice if those running the numbers would give us an RFQ instead of RFV.
Bale litter - how are you collecting and dispersing it?
Banked grass feed tests
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Those RFV numbers are amazing. That's better than alfalfa, isn't it?
It would be nice if those running the numbers would give us an RFQ instead of RFV.
Bale litter - how are you collecting and dispersing it?
PC - that is a pretty good system. We have very rarely supplemented on native (odd exception being extended periods of -40), and have tried to avoid bale grazing or even feeding hay on native at all costs due strictly to concerns over introduced species. I agree 100% that grass is amazing if given the chance.
NR - that is a good plan. We have looked at that too. Now if only I could find the right progressive guys to work with on even 1/2 of my bright ideas???
NR - that is a good plan. We have looked at that too. Now if only I could find the right progressive guys to work with on even 1/2 of my bright ideas???
Northern Rancher
Well-known member
well it would be cheaper to send cows to bale graze up here than to truck feed-the thing about bale grazing is that it's about at least a five year treat for the grass. the corral cleaners are just up the road at $300/hr-lot cheaper to unload the feed in the pasture at the cows mouth. by the time the bucking horses paw through the bale sites there isn't much waste at all-no more than the ring off death around a feeder.
Grassfarmer
Well-known member
PureCountry said:
That's very interesting PC and it causes me to ask a few questions of you.
First the samples you took the first time were selective samples trying to guess what the cows would eat - did they just take a "whole crop" sample the second year?
Second - How did crop yield differ on the two years (over and above bale grazings yield boost ie how dry was it in 08 compared to 07? I know we get substantially better quality in a dry year when yield is low.
Third - I note your Calcium levels went from .30s to .40s. How does this relate to your dilemma about whether you can bring your land up to an acceptable level by adding calcium supplement to the land. Does this prove you don't need to raise them by supplementing the soil or does it prove that you have found an alternate way to do it?
little bow rancher
Well-known member
well it's being a long day , the point I was trying to make is that some people not all look to much into fact and figures when all they need to do is watch there cows ,thats about as plain as I can make it , and we have the same accent yours is just a little thicker than mine,Grassfarmer said:little bow rancher said:
Hey little bow you must have a worse accent than me, I have trouble understanding your postsWhat does Soapweed do? - do you mean supplement the cows with something? if so when and with what? Thanks
PureCountry
Well-known member
Faster horses said:
Didn't you hear the big "Aaaaaaaahhhhh."? :lol:
PureCountry
Well-known member
Liveoak said:
It's pretty simple Liveoak, we buy hay bales, have a neighbour haul them in for us, dump them on the pasture, cut the twines off, and turn the cows in. When we first starting bale grazing some years back, I'd get out there with the bale truck or borrow a neighbour's tractor and make sure they were in these perfectly straight rows and spaced exactly 40' apart and such. After a couple years I realized that I was adding cost to an already expensive feeding system by handling the bales twice. So we just dumped these ones and pretty much let them sit where they fell off the truck. I scattered some around just to make it easier for cattle to get around them, so as not to get too thick of a litter pack left over.
Some people get excited about harrowing these bale grazed areas in the next spring. I prefer to let the cattle work it over again. Come back to it at some point with high density groups of yearlings that churn it up. Best thing I've seen so far has been our 'Pig Tractor". Plant them little babies on a thick bale grazing litter pack and it looks like it was roto-tilled in no time flat. :wink:
PureCountry
Well-known member
RSL said:
I know what you mean RSL. With certain things - like heritage breeds of hogs, cattle, horses and such I am a bit of traditonalist, even somewhat protectionist one might say. With pastures I am that way to a certain extent. When you think about native range, it developed the way it did for varying factors. The soil in this particular pasture has been the same for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Obviously 'Prairie Wool' is what adapted over that span. If I add organic matter, and the levels of Ca and many other things improves, can I expect the same species to still be the dominant ones? I guess I'm just looking at it as wanting to improve soil over the whole ranch. The original species that are there aren't really an impressive pasture due to overgrazing and such, so I'm happy to see lush forage growing 3' high there, even on a year like this. JMO
PureCountry
Well-known member
Grassfarmer said:
GF, 1st - Yes, that's how they took their samples. They clipped whole plants of varying species - smooth brome, meadow brome, fescues, natives, etc.
2nd - rainfall between the 2 years was almost the same, and outside of the bale grazed area growth was quite similar from year to year. If you get up on the river hills and look down on this area, it's like a big green oasis in the middle of a desert this year. I wanted the girls to take samples from outside the bale grazed area for comparison, but it didn't happen.
3rd - While it does prove that we can do it in alternative ways, as I've said before with baled feed being $100-150/ton this year, it's a very expensive system for feeding cows and supplementing soil. At those kind of prices one could practically spend the money on a 1-time soil amendment package that brought everything up to par, and end up with forage of a high enough quality to sustain cows easily throughout the winter without supplemental feed. At 12% protein and an RFV of 111, they ought to get fat while nursing a calf.
If you do the math on the cost - 1 bale in a bale-grazing system will cover the width of approx. 2 acres(32 feet). Half a mile being approx 2600'(for easy figuring) divided by 32' per bale area, means it would require 81.25 bales to cover 2 acres. That's 40.625 bales per acre @ 1400lbs = 56,875lbs X 6.25 cents/lb or $125/ton = $3,554.69 per acre
As a feeding system where cows are given 2-4 days worth of bales @ a time, it can work out to costing $2-3 per cow per day to feed at these prices. So all in all, no one can tell me that bale grazing isn't good for the soil, or a low-stress, labour reducing feeding system. However, it's expensive, even if hay is $80/ton, so I keep looking for other methods and alternatives in the mean time.
Northern Rancher
Well-known member
You can bale graze straw and just haul whatever your supplementing with evetry couple days-we've done it with from flax straw to frozen canola-I usually allow about 45 pounds of average hay per pair and don't take the horses into account-things seem to winter fairly well at that @ $80/ton that works out to 1.80/per day. just pricing things out right now as to what we'll winter on this year-if it involves straw and pellets we'd have to run the horses separate. We get the hay delivered to the cows mouth also-one thing i learned this year if you need to snow plow it's cheaper toplow a big circle and just unload gradually pieing out from the outside edge and filling in the middle-wayyyy cheaper than clearing a square area big enough to unload a truck. The cows have to be fed anyway and I haven't fpound a more cost effective system yet-I'd stilllike about 500 extra cows to balegraze every winter.
Northern Rancher
Well-known member
I bet some of the hay crops guys are baling are costing $80 a tonne to put up-in a drought ANY hay-home raised or bought is too expensive IF you are honest about your equipment/fertilizer.establishment, opportunity costs-if yu aren't homegrown wins every time.
Grassfarmer
Well-known member
Must be too late at night after a long day PC but I'm not grasping your bale grazing costs. I'm not arguing your actual costs but you seem to be charging the entire cost of feeding the cows to the land improvement project which is rather unfair isn't it? If you were feeding your cows somewhere else or by another means the bulk of that feed cost would still be incurred wouldn't it? Isn't the cost of your land improvement by the process of bale grazing only costing you the difference between bale grazing and feeding by some other means (by implication something that results in more of the hay going through the cow in this case?)
Not taking a dig at bale grazing here, actually trying to give it a better kick of the can in your figures.
NR - Couldn't agree more with you on the cost of home grown hay but I suspect we both live in marginal grain areas so tend to have plenty fairly cheap feed at hand. Even around here I can't figure out the guys that grow hay though - the opportunity cost of owning land worth $1500 an acre and then having all the mechanical costs of harvesting and only getting 1-2 bales per acre. Most of them round here hay year after year and do nothing to redress the nutrient removal from the land. Then there are the years when the small expensive crop of hay you've grown gets ruined by rain. Doesn't make any sense to me although I can see better reason for it with folks like gcreekrch who lives a prohibitively long way from alternate feed sources.
My neighbors think i'm a rich European because I can afford to buy my winter feed :roll: - I tell them I can't afford the land to do it the way they do. Many of them bought land when it was $4000 a quarter. Actually I prefer the option to buy in either winter feed or extra pasture for winter grazing and at the moment the pasture is a far better buy in terms of feeding a cow for a day (70-90c/day) Unfortunately it doesn't hasten the land improvement on the home place the way buying in winter feed does. Somewhere we have to find a balance.
Not taking a dig at bale grazing here, actually trying to give it a better kick of the can in your figures.
NR - Couldn't agree more with you on the cost of home grown hay but I suspect we both live in marginal grain areas so tend to have plenty fairly cheap feed at hand. Even around here I can't figure out the guys that grow hay though - the opportunity cost of owning land worth $1500 an acre and then having all the mechanical costs of harvesting and only getting 1-2 bales per acre. Most of them round here hay year after year and do nothing to redress the nutrient removal from the land. Then there are the years when the small expensive crop of hay you've grown gets ruined by rain. Doesn't make any sense to me although I can see better reason for it with folks like gcreekrch who lives a prohibitively long way from alternate feed sources.
My neighbors think i'm a rich European because I can afford to buy my winter feed :roll: - I tell them I can't afford the land to do it the way they do. Many of them bought land when it was $4000 a quarter. Actually I prefer the option to buy in either winter feed or extra pasture for winter grazing and at the moment the pasture is a far better buy in terms of feeding a cow for a day (70-90c/day) Unfortunately it doesn't hasten the land improvement on the home place the way buying in winter feed does. Somewhere we have to find a balance.
Northern Rancher
Well-known member
Actually quite a few guys buy feed up in our neck of the woods-there's a fair number of guys that just grow hay also. Most years we can buy hay fairly reasonable here.
Grassfarmer
Well-known member
There has been a big change around my area in the last 5 years - very few folks growing hay to sell now. Most of the guys doing that sold their cows, rent the crop land to the boys in black which leaves the bush/riparian pastures available for rent. This is naturally grass country and it really shows in years like this - green immature crops and it's nearly mid September. As long as guys want to grow grain crops in this climate I'll be happy to buy their byproducts. Our silage will cost us under 5c/lb of dry matter this year and will be a lot better feed than most of the hay around here. Certainly doesn't inspire me to buy a $15,000 discbine, a $30,000 baler etc, etc.
That haying equipment looks pretty cheap during the tough years and folks are paying $60-$100 per bale. If we could get a guaranteed long term price it may be more appealing, but forage producers can promise whatever they want, if it didn't grow they don't have it. In this area there are few alternatives to hay, so I think I'll keep putting it up myself.
Can't see myself paying $30,000 for a baler.... heck, my one baler / tractor aren't worth $10,000 between the two of them! There's plenty of ways to be savvy, eliminating the evil mechanical monsters is probably fine for some folks, but it's not necessarily the best for everyone.
Can't see myself paying $30,000 for a baler.... heck, my one baler / tractor aren't worth $10,000 between the two of them! There's plenty of ways to be savvy, eliminating the evil mechanical monsters is probably fine for some folks, but it's not necessarily the best for everyone.
Grassfarmer
Well-known member
Silver said:
Agreed there are different ways to do it in different areas Silver and they can all work for different people. With using the grain by-products (weedy, late or hailed crops) like we usually do a poor growing season usually increases the feed availability instead of decreasing it. On the other hand the guys that grow hay around here for their cows get half the usual crop or less in a dry year. With their system they are also locked into making payments on their machinery and they still need to turn around and buy hay in a market where there is a scarcity. We are very fortunate to be close to good feed sources and have a flexible system that can exploit the opportunities that presents.
Locality creates a lot of different options and risks.
We have a haybine and baler but produce most of our feed on shares. The cost works out quite reasonably for us as we have no land cost, and it reduces risks to our cash flow. For the neighbour it saves significant equipment costs.
Purchasing hay/feed locally can be difficult and expensive in our specific locale. We also rent some grass that we winter graze, and more grass is becoming available all the time.
There is not a lot of hay close by, so the risk is transferred from weather related to fuel/haulage risk. Swath grazing, late calving and stockpiled grass are far more reasonable options for us, and I expect to be using DDGs some this winter as well.
We have a haybine and baler but produce most of our feed on shares. The cost works out quite reasonably for us as we have no land cost, and it reduces risks to our cash flow. For the neighbour it saves significant equipment costs.
Purchasing hay/feed locally can be difficult and expensive in our specific locale. We also rent some grass that we winter graze, and more grass is becoming available all the time.
There is not a lot of hay close by, so the risk is transferred from weather related to fuel/haulage risk. Swath grazing, late calving and stockpiled grass are far more reasonable options for us, and I expect to be using DDGs some this winter as well.