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NPN (Urea) vs. Natural Tubs

The product with ruminsen wasn't mix 30. It came from Central Valley Ag. Presuming QLF, as that's what they have sold for their liquid product for a while now. This was 2002 I think. I'd say the other feed store i talked to sold mix 30 for a good 10-15 years at least.

What's your location loomix guy? I know of a guy up east of springview. I understand the whole legestists aspect. Neighbors use to get steep by the semi load. I'd go over & get it with a 500 gallon slide in pickup tank on a trailer. 2 years ago I took trailer to palmer & got enough steep to do what I needed. Not quite 100 miles, but $200 a ton difference I got the product I knew would do what needed done done, & pretty easy work. Cost some fuel, but felt it averaged out.
 
I did the ruminsen thing in 2002 when we got the powered milk deal. I used mine on the liquid. It was a minimum order & had no place to store extra....coop needed their trailer back, empty. Plus the hay I was treating was slough hay I cleaned out of the neighbors pasture to sell as mulch when they do shoulders on the highway. Between needing to get it all used up & guessing the hay needed all the help it could get, I divided the load up on all those bales. It was over kill, but didn't think it would hurt either. Live & learn.
 
I'm 6 miles north of the Kansas/Nebraska border on US 281. ;-)

My product comes from the plant in Fremont, NE.

Do you know Greg Swim up at Springview?
 
Amo said:
Ya, I got 50 bales of grinding hay. Really didn't want to pay $2XX an hour to grind, get modified ddg, drag feed wagon out etc. Place I stopped at yesterday sells mix 30. Said mix 30, lumix, qlf are now all same company. Maybe still separate companies, but same ownership.

Anyway, mix 30 is $253 a ton. Liquid is handy. I used to spray it on with bale processor to help feed less palatable hay. As stated above, price it out per cost of pound of protein its not that cheap either.....your buying water. With that said, I did call down to Palmer Nebraska. They make stuff like mix 30. I have bought the raw base ingredient, steep from them in the past. $53 a ton f.o.b.
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We have to pay $440 an hour for grinding
 
The person from Springview is Jason Orton. Pretty sure he sells Loomix. Probably gone right past your place. Sometimes when we go to Kansas, we go down 281.

It sure could be 400. Haven't ground since 2011. I'll try to find out.
 
loomixguy said:
I'd like to see what kind of a grinder anybody would pay $440 an hour for. Do they provide the Vaseline, too?
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Most likely the same as everyone else but no $440 no show up plain and simple.
 
Npn in forage diet - faster horses already settled the issue. MSU concurrs. As for feed salesmen, if they say ol so and so does real well with this feed, just sic the heeler on them and be done with it. A 2 second Google search will provide by God data. Npn on roughage is just a cheap trick to make protein analysis look good. One other thing, not all proteins are equal, like chicken feathers are high protein but it's not available (cough coop cough).


Urea works best with high-energy diets that contain crude protein levels below 12 percent. When using poor quality forages, cattle performance can be reduced if urea is supplemented in place of a higher quality protein supplement such as soybean meal or cottonseed meal. This is likely the result of insufficient UIP in the diet rather than the faster rate of ammonia release in the rumen. Even slow-release forms of urea (biuret) are usually not effective in improving urea use on forage-based diets due to nitrogen recycling of the rumen and liver for secretion in the saliva. Thus, urea is generally a poor supplemental nitrogen source on forage-based diets. This includes forage and grain combination diets commonly used as "step up" rations during the introductory stages of cattle finishing. There is a need for rumen degradable protein other than NPN on these diets.
Rumen bacteria must have sufficient carbohydrate levels (energy sources) available to them if the nitrogen in urea is to be effectively utilized. Urea generally works best with high grain diets that are rapidly fermented in the rumen. Forage-based diets are digested too slowly for urea to be used efficiently. In grain-based diets, urea feeding levels should not exceed 0.25 pounds per day or no more than one percent of the diet. With such small quantities, it is often difficult or impossible to effectively mix urea into mixed feeds on the ranch. Precise mixing equipment is required to do this properly. The best option is usually to purchase a urea-containing supplement from a reputable feed supplier. Never topdress urea over feed offered to cattle.
 
3 M L & C said:
Dang that's high. How many tons can they do an hour?
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It would depend on the quality of the hay, size of the screen, and just what the hay is....along with how handy the loader or hydrafork man is. Doesn't matter how much HP the unit has, it will only go through so fast. My best guess is with everything being perfect, 60-75 ton/hour. I know for a fact that in 1990 Old Man Jones' folks in Beemer, Nebraska could set you up with their best Mighty Giant Hydra fork unit with the biggest Cat engine available, probably 500-550 HP, swinging elevator, etc...trailer mounted, back your truck under it, for $130,000 complete.

If I had much hay to grind, and had a 150 or so horse tractor sitting around, I'd find me a FarmHand 900B PTO grinder and grind my own damn hay before I'd pay some grinder jockey $440/hour. That's insane.

But what do I know? I spent almost 25 years running one of those damn things all winter long. 3 different FarmHand models & at the end a Mighty Giant.
 
We picked up a roto grind last year that was like three years old don't think it ground more than a dozen bales. It's not as fast as a hay buster but was less than half price of a new roto grind and we always have a big tractor around to run it. Also nice you can grind when you want. If the wind comes up just quit and come back after dark or whenever it goes down. Only down side is the roto grind doesn't like net wrap so it's just less of a problem if you cut it off first. I was throwing a few not nice words at it a couple weeks ago when we had all the ice and decided needed to bring the heifers home from stalks. :wink:
 
I don't like grinding feed, it's dang tough on a tractor and I've seen way to many fires to take on that job any more. I also remember the old rancher that said the less iron you use in ranching the more dollars you'll end up with. I believe there's a lot of truth in that
 
That looks like a haybuster model. My guy has a mighty giant. Alfalfa grinds super easy. First time i was grinding course grass with a 4" screen I think. He had a scale. 77680# in about 40 minutes. Still had to pay for the hour! Best tons per hour I ever had. Like loomix guy said, you can never tell. I had some really course hay once. Knew I'd grind it....so let it get super dry. Usually dryer goes faster/easier. I had the opposite.

They do a lot of work in a short period of time. A farmhand would be handy, but I sure thought for the amount that Brad could do in an hour it was worth it. Like 3M says...you can do it when you want. Local guy sold calves one day. He told Brad sometime that week he'd need to grind. Well he went to bar that night after the sale. Got home, wife left a note on the fridge.....Brads going to be here at 6. So he went out & started hauling hay!
 
Can feed an awful lot of hay grinding and mixing that cows would otherwise not either not be able to eat (higher nitrate) or just not want to eat (rained on to mature whatever else you want to put in here). This year we are feeding some feed that is 14% protein but right at the top of safe to feed to breds with some 11% protein medium nitrate and 8% protein with not hardly any nitrate. If we didn't grind would have to sell the 14 for jack squat and buy good feed back. Running the grinder we have isn't any harder maybe less than field work on a tractor. Have to hook the grinder up to 12v off tractor then you can adjust so when rpm goes down x much it stops the tub.
 
$320 an hour here for tubgrinding. He can do at least 70 bales an hour. I've tried to keep count but it never works. We use a skidloader and loader tractor. Skidder brings the bales and the tractor dumps 'em in. Grinder is too tall for the skidder to dump in. It's fast & furious.
 
I'm like the guy that doesn't like to spend money on feed prep. In Kansas we could get hay ground for $10ish a ton. When corn is only $100 ton, 10% is enough. I can't see corn breaking out of these prices, but I never thought oil could go below $60, or calves above $1.50
 
We ended up getting $60/hour for the last FarmHand grinder we had...back about 1987. When we got the Mighty Giant, we made our first round at the old price, but told everybody the next time would run $100/hour. When they saw what the Jones could do compared to the FarmHand, everybody offered to pay the $100 for their first session. We got out of the grinding in 1991, still charging the $100. I know that was a long time ago, and everything is way more expensive now, but $440 seems like highway robbery.

Producers have gotten smarter over the years, too. Seems like we ground a lot of crap bales that were stacked two high or were ricked in low spots where they soaked up water like a sponge. When those bales would get frozen solid it made for interesting times and creative language.

The POS New Holland chain balers are pretty much a thing of the past now...thankfully. Dad was running the Jones one time and I was feeding it with a bunch of NH baled bales. Dad heard a tick tick tick noise and raised the tub up. Imagine my surprise when a 5 or 6 foot piece of baler chain came flying right past my head at Warp 10 while I was on the loader.
 
Last winter It cost me $6 a bale to grind some pretty good hay but once it got into the rough hay it was over $12 a bale. Doing the math I'm money ahead to sell the rough hay to the feed lot and buy back top quality hay for $15 a bale more. Once you grind that poor hay you have to spend $6 to $10 a bale doctoring it up for them to eat it. I made a decision this year to buy 2nd cut alfalfa they basically shake apart and work fine in my tmr wagon $100 a ton with a 1/2 mile haul.Skip the grinder all together.
 
When grinding hay, you are making it more palatable, easier to eat, but the nutrition in it stays the same. With all the conversation on this topic, remember that supplementing and substituting are two entirely different things.

I agree with Denny on the $100/ton alfalfa hay being a 'best buy'. Years ago I saved an article on Cost of crude protein article in the Western Beef Producer. They compared the cost of different protein sources. The cheapest source of protein was alfalfa hay at $100/ton. That was back when the other protein sources were much cheaper than they are today. Yet, at that time, if you told a producer to buy alfalfa hay at $100/ton, you would have met with a lot of resistance.
 

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