Tap said:
Soap, I hope you continue to post the nice pictures. I like angus cattle very well, but a good looking herd of red cows such as yours make an attractive bunch as well. The thing I will never get used to is how your warm season grass country is behind our further northern grass. How far do you have to get south of you before they have earlier grass? And does basically all of the sandhills green up at once in general, or does it come earlier in the southern sandhills?
Thanks Soapweed.
Tap, these ol' Sandhills are always slow to come around in the spring but they tend to stay pretty green fairly late into the fall. Several different times through the years, I have put cattle out in the summertime on the LaCreek Valley in South Dakota, which is six miles straight north of our house, through some very rough sandy hills. That country is always at least two weeks ahead of us, and I usually trailed cattle up there to start summer grazing on the first of May. That area has more harder type grasses, and is very productive if it gets good rain. Even with adequate moisture, though, the grasses there start to fall by the wayside from August on.
In the Sandhills proper, grass is not ready to be turned out on until May 15th, and if you are going to continuous-graze a pasture all summer, you better wait until at least the first of June to give it a good head-start or it won't keep up.
My thought is that if you live in the Sandhills, practice rotated intensive grazing, calve late, and try to get by without feeding very much hay, and were only going to feed hay one month out of the year, that month should be from April 15th through May 15th. That is the time to lock cattle into fairly small pastures, feed hay, and let the Sandhills rest and rejuvenate for the upcoming summer.
I am guessing that most of the Sandhills proper (which comprises most of central and western Nebrask) all behaves about the same. I doubt if the south end greens up much faster than does our north end. It does seem like the Sandhills are more drought-resistant than other areas, and the sub-irrigated meadows usually produce at least some hay, even on very dry years. As one real estate agent said, while comparing the our country to the hard grass of South Dakota, "The Sandhills is never very good country, but it's always pretty good country."
Hope this answers your questions, Tap. Probably other native Sandhillers would have different viewpoints on the subject, but this is my take, for what it is worth.