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Calf catcher

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Quack grass seed used to come from Timothy seed fields that got out of control. It was easy to separate the two at the cleaning plant. I suspect since Roundup got relatively cheap it will be hard to find.
Intermediate Wheatgrass looks just like Quack grass. It is suppose to give the highest tonnage when seeded with Alfalfa in a one cut system. It also gets very course when harvested late and goes dormant when drought stressed. They grow it for seed around here. My brother in law hayed a well fertilized field that was turned down for seed and the yield was huge. Those seed field that get 100# of Nitrogen can be real eye openers.
I saw a field of that hybrid brome/ Quack grass but I don't think they went anywhere with that and ordered it all sprayed out.
Quack grass is one of the more desirable invaders and I welcome it in a straight Alfalfa stand, but I wouldn't seed it and sure wouldn't pay much for seed, as there are a lot better grasses out there.
If you got the right person at DU that is probably the best bet.
I like creeping red fescue for banked grass. It stem cures well and looks green in the bottom just like it is growing. You don't have to worry about hurting it if you have to graze it short and it takes traffic if you have to feed on it before green up. It does need pretty good fertility and will be one of the first to go dormant when dry.
 
thanks for your post.

We have some tough conditions here. Heavy clay soil, better known
as GUMBO. But crested wheat grass does well as an introduced grass;
as does intermediate. They don't care much for pubescent grass here
as it doesn't seem to make very good hay.

I have read a bit about dry land orchard grass, but don't know anything about it except that it is supposed to grow in heavy ground. I suppose
the seed is expensive, but to tell the truth, I haven't checked it out.
 
In the past I have seen calves nibble the flowers and seed balls off of the Canada thistle. They are pretty careful about how they go at it!! I have also seen cows eat cut Canada thistle stem to stern after I clipped pastures that have thistle stands in them.

Now if only we could get them to eat the bull thistles . . .
 
Faster horses said:
Soooo, where can I find some quackgrass seed? And I'm drop dead
serious...

When you find out FH let me know. I looked on the net for it a year ago and all I could find was pages and pages of how to eradicate it. :(

I figure if a "weed" is green, the cows eat it and you can't kill it it is a weed I want. :D
 
Doesn't grow here for some reason.
Faster Horses if it doesn't grow where you are there is probably a reason for that. Buying seed would just be an expensive way to find out why it doesn't grow there. With a common and easy doing plant like this it would have been there already if the conditions had been suitable.
 
Several years ago I used to tell the young men I had hired at the time, not to worry about the cow whose calf we were tagging or cutting, that they wouldn't hurt them. I was wrong. In the fall of 2001 while tagging a newborn by myself, momma planted her head into my chest and could have done much worse as I was several feet away from my 4-whlr and flat on the ground trying to get my breath and recover. I slept in the recliner for several weeks while my ribs healed. The next spring in Iowa, a man was killed and a woman suffered a broken pelvis and cracked ribs while handling baby calves. Be careful our there fellow ranchers. Handling baby bovines is an accident waiting to happen.
 
I was always under the impression that if you thought it was a weed you called it quackgrass, if you wanted to by the seed you called it couchgrass. I do stand to be corrected however.

If anyone wants thistle seed or quack grass seed, you can come harvest it here for free :?
 
The proper name would be Agropyron repens for both quack and couch.

Quackgrass exists in areas low in water soluble ca, high in P, K , Mg, S, Zn, B, Cl and Se. Low in Humus, not porous and likes moisture in a hard soil environment. So if you want the perfect Quack crop maintain this regiment.

Before I hear some say but, and it isn't, or is like that here, not all of these ducks need to be perfectly in a row to have some quack. Like some here have said, If is grows and the cows like it, go with it.
 
Northern Rancher said:
You can blame bale grazing-moon phases and weld till your blue in the face but there are cattle that are genetically destined to be nut cases

I agree on the genetics side, however when cows that have been around here for 7 or 8 years suddenly decide that they don't like seeing their calves handled, when in the past they were just fine with it, I'd say genetics isn't playing a part in it and it has something to do with environment. Only two things are different about the environment around here since those old girls came to roost: Its been a cold, miserable winter and they haven't been pen fed at all this year, so they haven't been handled one bit. Now that I'm 4 weeks into calving season, I haven't had a single cow look cross eyed at me when tagging and bagging their cattle.

At least thats what my welder says, and I think I'll listen to it. Its a pretty blue and treats me well.

Rod
 
I don't know if it's entirely environmental either, I just think some of those formerly gentle cows can get a rush of hormones at calving time that changes their perspective on things. I've had 'crazy' cows slip through the culling program more often than I should have only to see them be just fine the next year. But I think you're right Rod, not being around them seems to make them a bit more of a wild animal. I really notice the difference between the bunch of cows that haven't calved that I'm in all the time vs. the pairs that are turned out and aren't seeing human beans much anymore. When I take a stroll through the pairs I think I get about the same reaction a bear would get, but in the uncalved bunch I gotta kick them to get them up to have a look at them.
Wild is a different story than protective though, and I have limited patience with those critturs.
 
Silver said:
Wild is a different story than protective though, and I have limited patience with those critturs.

Yeah, when I was expanding and buying cattle at auctions I ended up with a few of those. The worst was one that calved in February in the cold. Long story, short, she ended up striking the loader tractor full tilt several times while I was grabbing her calf and loading it in the bucket to get it back to the barn to dry off. Was unreal. I never had a cow put me out of a pen like that one did. A bat and a fencepost did absolutely nothing to phase her. When I went to ship her in the fall, she jumped a 6 foot tall fence, got her leg stuck between the top two rails and broke it.

Shortly after she mended, she ended up dropping another calf in the cold and it was a similar gong show. I was shipping feeder cattle the next day, and she jumped another 6 foot fence into the handling facility thinking one of them was her calf. She got loaded along with the rest of them. :lol: The trucker asked if he should try and break her out of there. I about smacked him. :lol: I was more than happy to bottle feed her calf that spring.

Rod
 
There is another kind of crazy fresh calved cow too - the one where their hormones or sugars get mixed up or something like that. :? We used to see more of it in Scotland and I don't know if that was due to a different background mineral balance. I'm talking about the scenario where the cow takes a kind of rage to it's new calf just as the calf is trying to stand usually. They roar and push the calf and sometimes we would remove the calf for a while. We once had a heifer break it's calfs back against a stone wall in the barn. At that point we investigated it more and discovered there is a proper medical term and reason for this (forgotton it now) The remedy was to get the cow to eat about 2lbs of sugar and this more or less instantly restores the correct balance in her head.
I'm not making this stuff up folks as crazy as it may seem. :)
 
Guess I'm just lucky-our cows really don't see too many people on foot from Nov-till about now and for the most part they are a lot quieter than when we pen calved and pretty much lived with them. I think the more you monkey with some cattle the less they like it. How in the name of God you'd get a cow on the fight at calving to eat two pounds of sugar is beyond me- 130 grains of lead works very well.
 
Grassfarmer said:
There is another kind of crazy fresh calved cow too - the one where their hormones or sugars get mixed up or something like that. :? We used to see more of it in Scotland and I don't know if that was due to a different background mineral balance. I'm talking about the scenario where the cow takes a kind of rage to it's new calf just as the calf is trying to stand usually. They roar and push the calf and sometimes we would remove the calf for a while. We once had a heifer break it's calfs back against a stone wall in the barn. At that point we investigated it more and discovered there is a proper medical term and reason for this (forgotton it now) The remedy was to get the cow to eat about 2lbs of sugar and this more or less instantly restores the correct balance in her head.
I'm not making this stuff up folks as crazy as it may seem. :)

Interesting... we bought some fancy angus heifers one year, and 8/10 of them tried their best to kill their offspring at birth. I'd never seen anything like it, and attributed it to genetics :???:. All but one calved the next year without problems... the one was sold open the following fall :wink:. Maybe she ultimately got marinated in a sugar sauce...whatever it takes :lol:.
 
How in the name of God you'd get a cow on the fight at calving to eat two pounds of sugar is beyond me- 130 grains of lead works very well.
Actually it's not too difficult - remove the calf, give her a pile of grain or pellets with the sugar in and leave her a couple of hours. Come back and she is a reformed character. This is talking about a specific medical condition they get which you may not have encountered, it's not talking about EXTs or generally aggressive cows.
Has anyone else encountered this or knows the proper veterinary term for it?
 
Grassfarmer said:
How in the name of God you'd get a cow on the fight at calving to eat two pounds of sugar is beyond me- 130 grains of lead works very well.
Actually it's not too difficult - remove the calf, give her a pile of grain or pellets with the sugar in and leave her a couple of hours. Come back and she is a reformed character. This is talking about a specific medical condition they get which you may not have encountered, it's not talking about EXTs or generally aggressive cows.
Has anyone else encountered this or knows the proper veterinary term for it?

With the problem heifers I had, I just separated them for a couple of hours, and let them settle down. They were fine after I did that, without feeding them sugar :?. These heifers weren't aggressive towards me, just their calves... if they tried to move :roll: . I've mentioned this before, but I had a friend who was pleasantly surprised when his cows didn't "mud-up" their newborns :?. Maybe if he supplemented his herd 24/7 with sugar cubes, he'd be on to something. Myself, I prefer to just get rid of them.
 
I don't calve where I can give her a sugar treat for being a nutcase- shoot-ship or do something else and get rid of the dumb biatch.Most of problem with cattle is giving troubles second chances-is this cow needing sugar hereditary at all-I'd just as soon not risk it.
 
Northern Rancher said:
I don't calve where I can give her a sugar treat for being a nutcase- shoot-ship or do something else and get rid of the dumb biatch.Most of problem with cattle is giving troubles second chances-is this cow needing sugar hereditary at all-I'd just as soon not risk it.


Settle down old Lad. I was just commenting it works for some non-believers. Both times we used it resulted in heifers raising a calf instead of killing it at birth. You can bet they didn't get it a second time as they weren't here to do it again. I would much sooner deal with a problem that leaves us with a cow and calf to sell in the fall than a fat dry to sell in mid summer.
 
I don't calve where I can give her a sugar treat for being a nutcase- shoot-ship or do something else and get rid of the dumb biatch.Most of problem with cattle is giving troubles second chances-is this cow needing sugar hereditary at all-I'd just as soon not risk it.
So would you shoot a cow that had milk fever to uphold your tough cowboy image? the condition I am talking about is a lot less common and less likely to be hereditary than milk fever. All it takes is a little knowledge to treat it.
 

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