Thanks, C Thompson. I like to hear about the way others do what they do. And at times, we have adopted some of these things into our own operation.
For our part, March calving is a necessity. We don't have the grass at home to calve the cows out, and all our pasture (well darn close to all of it) is at least 1/2 hour away and up to 2 hours. Perhaps there are those out there that would feel comfortable about sending cows away to calve out, but I sure am not one of them. Grass comes in here in mid to late April, so it only makes sense for us to have the cows ready to go to pasture by the early part of May.
We've done some swath grazing and it works pretty good for us. Granted we haven't done it the way "they" (whomever they are) say, and our land is sandy enough that it works, we simply put the cows out on a 1/4 section at a time and they do the work(all of it). Usually the crop is short enough that the cows don't just eat the heads off.... But seriously, most of our fall grazing is either harvested crop land, with some native grass areas, or hay land and the grass around the creek. We've grazed up until January in the past, although usually we have to start feeding in December. I would say we average about 5 months of feeding, and we try to feed poorer quality forages (which are of course cheaper) along with a bit of good quality hay to keep the cows happy. We also like to keep Promolas out with the cows most of the winter. But in general our cows certainly aren't babied through the winter, they have to tough it out.
In our little corner of the province, we usually don't deal with a lot of nasty cold weather in March. It isn't unusual to have a week or so of cold weather, but usually it is pretty nice late winter calving with the temperatures hovering around freezing. As often as not, while March calving might be a bit colder, there will be a nasty storm or 2 that cause big problems in April, and we rarely have problems getting our calves through those. This year is quite an unusual March for us, and I would think for a large part of the province, I won't be surprised to find out that it might be one of the coldest ones on record.
Maybe I take it the wrong way, and I apologize if I do, but I try not to 'preach' that what I do is best (I hope I don't preach anyways) and I get my back up a bit when people are always telling those of us that calve earlier that we need to change our calving season. Once in a while is fine, but when it is a chorus it gets quite annoying.....
Now, lucky me, I'm off to bottle feed the newest 2 calves and check to make sure that there are no calves in danger of becoming popsicles....
