Author: Head Farm Steward

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July/August Grazing Plan

Oh, how plans change.  If you look at this post, you’ll see the July grazing plan.  It worked well to shade the cows on days well into the 90’s with heat index above 100.  Right on schedule, on the 25th, we were grazing #25.  Happy days.

Now what?  As I started working on my next plan, things cooled off.  The pastures held more feed than I estimated.  We slowed things down.  I had been expecting to do this (Note this is turned 90 degrees so North is to the Left.):

IntoAugust

But the cows are on 1 and it’s the 14th.    I gained two weeks.  Where did it come from?  Some of it was grazing the slope East and South of 3 and 4.  3 days were gained from grazing the unlabeled areas to the right.  A big gain was grazing the edge of the pond.  So, I’m doing fairly well.  I gained 2 weeks because of the cool weather and the use of reserve ground.

But is this all there is to planning your grazing?  Just vague lines on a map?  Well, not really.  If we have to feed hay, where should it go?  Where are the cows going to calve?  What portion of the farm is set aside for drought?  Planning to cut anything for hay?  Will you allow a field to totally rest for a year?  How is that specific area doing?  Are we seeing increasing or decreasing plant diversity?  Good carbon litter?  Where will the cows find shade in hot weather?  Do you have a plan B in case something unplanned happens…like prolonged rain and flooding or prolonged drought?  How will you fence in the Spring, Summer and Fall and how will that change?  How will you winter graze the stockpile?  Where should stockpile remain to start the spring rotation again?

But the questions don’t stop there.  When was that family vacation?  When is that friend getting married?  When do chicks arrive?  When do we usually plant the garden?  When will we have to put up strawberries, blueberries, peaches, green beans, tomatoes or apple sauce?  How are we going to build fence so we can conveniently work around social events, family plans and other farm work?

I want fat cows and healthy pastures.  This won’t happen on its own.  I have to plan my way.  Right now I try to plan a month at a time but in the near future I’ll be better at estimating and can shoot further out.  One of the early chapters of For the Love of Land: Global Case Studies of Grazing in Nature’s Image reminded me of the pressing need to transition to year-round planning instead of just winging it month to month.

Let’s complicate things further.  How many pigs will we pasture this year?  Where will we run them?  How can we coordinate their grazing with that of the cows?  How about turkeys?  Or broilers?  Where do they fit into the rotation?  It’s nice to add all that disturbance and manure but we have to allow recovery.

One step at a time.

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Raising Cattle that Fit the Box

“Fit the box”.  I’m sure it means cattle that conform to a certain set of criteria but let’s take it literally as it will serve the rest of the post.  Cattle that fit the slaughter box.

Click image for source.

Mechanization requires standardization.  Anything that deviates from what is expected lowers the efficiency of production.  Cattle slaughter is, largely, a mechanical process.  You can see much of the detail on Youtube.  I’ll give you a link in a second but only click if you feel like you should.  There are some rough places in this video that are challenging to our modern cultural norms.  If you do click through, pay attention to how similarly sized every animal is.  They all look the same hanging in the cooler.  Again, don’t click this if you just ate breakfast (Jeff).  You should watch the whole video but the important part starts at the 5 minute mark.  Here’s the link.

I may not produce for the commodity market but it pays to produce what the most common buyer will consume.  The most common buyer wants more of the same.  (Because their customers want whatever they see pictured in the magazine.  I think this is because nobody knows how to cook…they just know how to follow instructions.  It has to look like it does in the book or they get lost.  That’s another discussion.)  To fit the dis-assembly line the packer wants generally the same size of animal.  If there is little difference from one cow to the next, there is little need for adjustment.  They may buy larger or smaller animals but only at a discounted price.  Imagine if a plant was set up for the 650-900 pound carcass and we brought them a monster 3,500 pound bull!  They wouldn’t want it.  It wouldn’t fit in the conveyor from the video above.  Similarly, if we take them a 600 pound steer…that’s too small.  It might turn around in their handling equipment.  They may be more willing to take the steer over the bull but either one will be sold at a discount.  It doesn’t fit their program.  It doesn’t fit the box.

So what prompted this post?  Why can’t you ship dexter cattle to stockyards?

The lower body weight of a dexter equates to a lower feed requirement for maintenance. That means you can pack more in per acre. But we run into a problem when we ship a frame 00 cow to a packer that is used to seeing frame 6 or frame 7 cows…nearly 20 inches of difference. Cattle typically slaughter at 65% of live weight.  That means a 500 pound frame 00 heifer will yield a 325 pound carcass.  An 1100 pound frame 6 heifer will yield a 715 pound carcass.  The smaller has half the t-bone…half the hamburger per kill!  The cuts themselves are smaller.  It may taste great, it may grow well, it may be feed-efficient raising more overall pounds per acre but…what do you do with the ones you don’t direct retail or sell as breeding stock? Here in Illinois I have to pay a fee (tax) per head of livestock slaughtered. The more pounds of beef I can divide that cost over, the lower the percentage cost. So, as a businessman and a grazer, I have to find that happy medium between an elephant cow that can’t eat enough forage to re-breed and a mouse cow that is fat, slick and fertile but won’t fit the box. I’m content to stay with frame 3-4 cows and keep looking for frame 2 bulls.

What is all this Frame Score nonsense?

I’ll let the American Angus Association take care of that as they were the first search result.  Look through the table and compare a mature frame 4 cow to a mature frame 4 bull.  The cow is 50″ at the hip, the bull is 54″.  Go down basically 2 inches on each and we’re at frame 3.  You understand?  So there’s a 4 inch difference between a frame 4 bull and a frame 2 bull.  Now, keep going down on the scale at this site and you’ll see where dexters usually come in.  Here’s an illustration of overall size differences between cattle (click the image for another, slightly different breakdown of frame scores by hip height).

Click image for source.

There is no way a frame 7 bull would last on fescue and weeds at my farm.  He would need more concentrated fuel to keep weight on.  Without concentrated feed the poor animal will spend most of the day just trying to ingest enough forage to maintain weight, robbing it of valuable time ruminating and digesting that forage.  It could be possible if I maintain very high quality forage in all paddocks but by doing so we’re giving up our unfair advantage…cheap grass.  At the other end of the spectrum are the miniature breeds.  They will quickly fill their rumen and lie down to work on digestion.

But, wouldn’t it be fun to run fifty 2,200 pound frame 7 bulldozers across my pastures!  It might also be fun to run 2 dexters per acre through a grazing dairy…if I could find appropriately adjusted attitudes.  But the most fun of all is paying my bills with cash to spare.  To come out ahead grazing, I need a cow that will raise a calf every year on minimal inputs, eating medium-quality grass and needing a minimum of labor.  The calf has to be sized to sell to the widest possible consumer base for the sake of price stability and market predictability.  The cowmen near me who have done this successfully for years suggest I should be shopping for frame 3 to 5 cows.  I’m inclined to take their advice.

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Trimming Those Hard to Reach Places

I have a hard time trimming here and there…but no need to go into that.  I’m talking about trimming grass.  There are places it is simply dangerous and foolish to drive a tractor.  For example, the pond’s edge.

We spend a lot of time at our pond swimming, skating (in the winter), catching frogs, fishing or paddling around in our boats.  Most of these activities require access to the shore.  When you are barefoot and wearing shorts…well, a sand beach would be ideal.  Let me know if you want to contribute to the sandy beach fund.  In the meantime, we prefer to keep the weeds short.

PondsEdge1

So how do you get it done?  For years we haven’t.  This year things are different.  We have cows.

PondsEdge3

This ground hasn’t been grazed in years…since I was a kid – so the grass is fairly sparse.  Much of what was out there wasn’t very tasty…but they do like Johnsongrass.  They don’t care for goldenrod no matter what though.  One thing they excel at is trimming up lower branches and opening up new fishing areas.  Along the way they trample in tons of carbon, add fertility and help tighten plant spacing by pushing new seeds in contact with the soil.  That’s all good but we also lose a little hay from the hayfield…but most of it is pretty low-quality stuff anyway.  The cows need to move quickly over this ground.  No big deal though, I have gained 5 days of grazing by going around the pond and may get 3 more before we’re finished.

PondsEdge4They find their way into thickets and tangled masses of grapes, saplings and fallen limbs and tromp the whole down into the soil.  It’s pretty cool.  I have been trying to figure out how to cut into this oak regrowth all year and retain the strongest shoots.  Well, the cows figured it out for me.

PondsEdge2All of this is really accomplishing a couple of things that are very intentional.  First, I’m stretching my pasture by grazing stockpiled reserve elsewhere.  Second, I’m utilizing areas around the hay field that I can’t mow.  Having these edges grazed should help my hay cure faster beyond building fertility in the field over time.  I should point out, I have a fence keeping the cows out of my alfalfa and another fence keeping the cows out of the pond.  (Had to wade out around some trees with long fence posts a couple of times.)

Much of this exercise was inspired from years of reading Throwback at Trapper Creek.  Thanks Matron!

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Interview With David Hall Part 3

Parts one and two of this series focused largely on cows.  In this post I’ll wrap up with a focus on business and some final tips.  I didn’t want to pry into David Hall’s personal finances.  I asked him for the top-down view of his farm.  David said they run 400 head of cattle on top of a couple of off-farm businesses.  400 cows and he has time to pursue other interests in town!  So, where is the farm income?  He sells 150 bulls each year.  He sells culls at the local sale barn.  When he ran hair sheep (something he suggests strongly, more later) he sold lambs and cull ewes at the local sale barn.  They are into commodity production, seeking a high tonnage of medium-quality forage for a cow/calf operation instead of high-quality forage for a finishing operation.  That distinction is key.

“To maintain profitability each cow has to bring in a calf at weaning time.  Cows that are too hairy, too big or produce too much milk won’t last in a grazing operation.”

He breeds for fall calving.  Cows are most fertile in the fall, the temperatures are cooler which helps when grazing fescue, those calves help soak up the spring flush of grass and he gets another flush of grass in the fall just as the cows are calving.  He sells 18 month old bulls in the spring as well as weaned calves, just when both the local calf market and the bull market are at their peak.

Hall likes to feed hay.  “Land costs are high.  Feeding hay puts more head on the farm but you have to manage it carefully.”  For 2-3 years he won’t need any hay.  For 2-3 years he’ll need a little hay.  For 2-3 years he’ll need lots of hay.  Hall says to buy hay off-farm.  This went well with his whole theme of allowing specialists to specialize.  For example, someone else raises the stockers, he raises calves.  Allowing someone else to put up hay and own the equipment frees up your time and capital.  One less tractor could easily be 15 more cows.  He drove home how important he thought this was by telling me his family had owned a green farm equipment dealership for 30 years.  “Buying the hay off-farm may have $18-22 worth of fertilizer value (if you just roll out a round bale) we just rolled out for $25.”  Once the cows eat it, the fertilizer value goes up and he doesn’t have to de-stock his farm when forage becomes scarce.  I asked him how long he fed hay last winter (coming out of drought) and he said, “5 months.  But each day I only fed the cows 20% of their diet in hay instead of feeding them 100% hay for 30 days.”  That helped him stretch his stockpiled forage and increase recovery times.  “Feeding hay can make you profitable.”

David, I’m just getting started, next year I’ll have 60 acres and 10 cows.  What would you suggest to help me get stocked?  Here are his quick tips:

“Think about a marketing plan for calves.  Raise good heifers for the next few years as they will be in demand.”

“Buy 10-20 sale barn cows, 100 ewes (hair sheep), spend heavily on getting fencing and water ready and buy in all hay.  You’ll need a dog and better fencing to protect the sheep but sheep can be quite profitable and will utilize forage the cows ignore.  Parasites can be a real issue with sheep so you will need to lengthen the time between grazings.”

“Manage grazing as well as you can.  Whatever happens, do your best…but push for diversity.”  (I think he meant both in livestock and in landscape.)

Livestock are employees.  “Fire employees that don’t work.”

“A short, defined breeding season will push things forward faster than anything you can do.”

Thanks David.

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Interview With David Hall Part 2

Last time I wrote about a conversation I had with David Hall about recognizing the cost of raising a heifer calf.  She will have to throw her fourth calf at age 6 to pay for her own development.  This is no small feat as heifers are still growing themselves and gaining molars…without which, it’s hard to fully chew their cud.  That first calf is hard on a heifer as she has to provide milk for a growing calf while retaining/regaining condition so she cycles in time for her next pregnancy within a defined breeding window.  Without those molars, she faces an up-hill battle.  Now, I have heard Kit Pharo toss this around a little bit suggesting if we’re ever going to forgive a cow for coming up open it’s when she’s due for a second calf…but he hasn’t done that in practice, he just suggested it might pencil out.

That math makes sense but why bother raising heifers when I can buy bred heifers?  Either way somebody has to pay those heifer development costs but maybe I can save myself some labor if I can find replacement heifers of the same quality.  While it is possible to buy in heifers a little cheaper than I can raise them, it’s a little bit of a gamble genetically.  David said, “If my own herd genetics are good enough I can afford to spend more on my own heifers than taking a chance on new genetics.”

So, what is it we’re looking for when we are shopping for a long-lasting heifer?  Well, here are the herd requirements David listed on his first slide in the presentation:

  • Fit the environment (Adaptable)
  • Calm
  • Calving Ease
  • Fertile
  • Longevity
  • Low Maintenance Requirements

David started his presentation in February by showing a table of relative values comparing a business based on yearling sales to a feedlot.  According to the chart (which I believe was cited to a research company and I’m unwilling to republish), reproduction is 10x more important than carcass quality for yearling sales.  If you are in the business of selling calves, you have to have calves to sell.  The detail below should help us find stock that will work for us, delivering and weaning a calf year after year but keep in mind, fertility is the top priority.  So let’s look at the criteria in detail, though I think you’ll find the details overlap considerably.

Adaptable:
“Be sure to breed to bulls who have a proven record on fescue.  Get a bull that is well adapted to your environment.”  If I have 25 cows and one bull, that bull makes up half of the genetic makeup of the next generation.  Picking the right bull matters and the consequences of a poor choice will impact the operation for years to come.  For example, I want a bull that is slick-haired as the shaggy cows (Ms. White) don’t perform as well as the slick cows (#111) on hot days in July.  Even better were the Jerseys who got slick in April or May in spite of cool weather and continue grazing when the heat index is above 100.  I feel that it is important to select within my herd for shorthorn genetics that are still out working alongside of the Jerseys.  Those Jerseys are the benchmark.  I have a couple of cows I can usually count on to be out there working on a hot day so I’ll tend to favor their offspring in the coming years.

Bull1

Disposition:
“Cull out ornery cows and bulls.”  As an inexperienced cow owner (I’m not a cattleman.  I’m a cow owner.  Maybe in a few years I’ll graduate.), it is easy to confuse ornery and nervous.  There is a difference between the cow that wants to eat you and the cow that is afraid of you.  Ms. White was terribly skittish when she first arrived and when she saw us it was time to run…and all the cows went with her…right through the fence.  I thought we were going to have to invite her to leave.  But, after a little while, with a few changes on our part, she fell into the routine.  She hadn’t been in as close proximity to humans as she necessarily is on a daily basis with our daily grazing moves.  She has to walk right past me every day now and is doing fine.  That said, she does tend toward excitement and we want cows that tend toward calm.  Hopefully she’ll give us steer calves each year.  Looking at cows as employees David says, “if the employee has a bad attitude she needs to be fired.”

Calving Ease:
If I pick a bull that throws heavy birth weight calves, I’m breeding heavy birth weight into my herd.  I don’t want to spend my spring camping out with the herd and pulling calves.  I want to sleep in my soft, comfy bed, get up early and head out to the pasture with a camera to take a picture of the new, live calf on the ground…a calf that was born without any interference from me.  If I am selecting for cows that bring a live calf in for weaning each year I have to be careful to do my part by stacking the deck in their favor.

Fertility:
We need a heifer that cycles three times before we introduce the bull at 15-16 months.  We need her to settle, not just the first time but also (and more importantly) on her second pregnancy.  Finally, we need her to continue to get pregnant every year, on time and bring a live calf in at weaning.  “View your cows as employees.  That cow’s job is to put on weight and bring in a healthy calf.  Any employee that doesn’t work gets fired.  No calf?  Fired.”

David says he breeds in the fall (more on that another time) from December 1 – January 15th.  “A short, defined breeding season will push [the herd] forward faster than anything you can do.”  However, a bred cow is worth more than an open cow so he DOES leave the bull in after January 15th.  “Leave the bull in to breed cows that are late BUT sell any cow that did not breed in 45 days.”

Finally, he points out that “there is a strong relationship between age of puberty and longevity.”  Cows that are late to mature don’t tend to last in the herd.

Longevity:
As we looked at last time, “Cows must be 6 years old and rear 4 calves to pay for her development costs.  Optimal economic return is in  years 8-11 for commercial cow/calf operations.”  So a 6 year-old cow has broken even.  I need more than 4 calves out of her to make money.  If she misses throwing a calf within a defined window she gets fired.  If her attitude is poor she gets fired.  If I have to pull a calf, she probably gets fired.  The odds are against 90% of the cattle in North America but without this culling we’ll go broke pampering our tea cup cattle and servicing the equipment required to pamper them.  That means a short, slick 14 year old cow with a good attitude has thrown 12 calves, year after year eating whatever there is to eat on my farm, with a little bite of salt and mineral.  Any cow that can do this has just the genetics we’re looking for in our future herd and continues to impact our herd genetics positively over time.  Any cow that can’t will be fired before she makes much of a genetic contribution to the herd.  Any bull I select for my own use MUST come from a older cows as that predisposes future generations for success.

Low Maintenance Requirements:
I just touched on this but if she is fertile and long-lasting she obviously doesn’t demand much from me.  I need thrifty cows.  Because much of my forage base is fescue, I’m looking for short, barrel-shaped, light-weight cows.  Hall said 70% of a cow’s feed is used to maintain condition.  A 1,700 pound cow has to eat much more feed to maintain condition than does a 1,000 pound cow.  There are only so many hours in a day.  How many pounds of forage can a cow ingest and ruminate on each day?  To be direct, a heifer that is weaned above 600 pounds won’t last.  The cards are stacked against the big cow in a forage-based operation.  111 stays fat no matter what.  Notice how wide her mouth…it’s as wide as her eyes.  Maybe wider.

111

So where do you find these cows?
I wish I knew.  You need to pick a bull based on his mother and her production numbers.  How many calves has she thrown.  How big were the calves?  How big is the mother?  How old is she?  When looking for heifers from within our herd or when buying outside, look for calves that weaned below 500 pounds.  We’re looking for a 4-5 frame score.  Again, big cows have to eat more to maintain condition.  Small cows are hard to market.  I could probably run 2-3 Dexter cows per acre on my farm but what feedlot wants to finish out Dexters?  I have to find the middle ground between what the market demands and what is profitable to produce.  They can’t be too big, they can’t be too small.  Hall says to sell the extremes.  Hall also pointed out that crossbred cattle tend to have better longevity.  That’s something to consider when buying stock.

Over time there are things you are watching for in your herd.  Cows should be feminine but we’re looking for function, not beauty.  A cow with a rough hair coat should find work elsewhere (I have a couple of these).  A cow with bad feet or a bad udder should go down the road.  Too big or too small?  No calf this year?  Poor attitude?  Prolapse?  Down the road.

This kind of selection doesn’t require much of the manager.  It comes back to the three O’s (which are really two O’s); Old, Open or Ornery.  The old cow will eventually come up open, weather from loss of teeth, bad joints or whatever.  The selection process is hard on herd numbers early on but success breeds success…literally.  In a few years…decades maybe – a picture of our cows will feature less leg than this one both from change in genetics and prenatal response to conditions and management.  Really.

GroupPhoto

In part 3 we’ll go a little more in-depth on ideas David has for making the operation profitable and ways to smooth out the highs and lows of the cattle market.

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Interview With David Hall Part 1

I heard David Hall of Ozark Hills Genetics speak at the Southern Indiana Grazing Conference last winter.

I was thinking about his presentation and reviewing my notes and needed a little clarification so I shot him an email.  This started because I’m working on the economics of each of our enterprises trying to answer a simple question: Would I be better off financially living in the suburbs?  I don’t work for free and I certainly don’t want to pay my livestock for the privilege of owning them.

I asked David:

I heard you speak in Indiana this spring and you said, “Cows must be 6 years old and rear 4 calves to pay for her development costs.  Optimal economic return is in years 8-11 for commercial cow/calf operations.”

I’m hoping you can give me a little more detail on that.  Spell out for me what you believe it costs to raise a replacement heifer on grass, when you sell her calves and what your expected return per calf is.  Also, how much should it cost a grazing operation to keep a cow each year?  This article suggests $350 per head but I have a hard time with that math.

Rather than reply to my email, which he said would require him to write a book, he asked me to call him back.  Over two phone conversations and nearly an hour of chatting I ended up with 5 pages of notes on top of the 5 pages of notes I took during his presentation.  (Talk about a generous man!)

He was ready when I called and, after greeting me politely, started right in.  “Cost is wildly different between ranches but you can roughly figure $500-550 for every weaned calf.  This counts salt, mineral, vet, medicine, land charge (calculated on how much it would cost you to rent your neighbor’s ground) and how much time you spend.”  Obviously packing more animals in per acre without raising your feed bill is a good thing and spreading your time across more animals helps with the labor charge, not to mention discounts for buying salt and mineral in volume.  Labor is the big expense and reckoning the rest of the data as closely as I can I come up with $450 to keep a cow each year.  Since some percentage of cows are going to come in without a calf at weaning that price should go up but let me be a little lazy in this post.  We’ll stick with the $500 figure for my farm, you calculate your own for your farm.  Feeding hay can really ratchet that annual maintenance up.

That takes us to point of weaning.  Now that we know what a calf costs, let’s find out what she’s worth.  Right now, that 450 pound weaned heifer – that cost us $500 to raise – is worth $2/pound.  That varies by year.  So, any heifer we keep this year should be reckoned at that price and we should work from there.  Think of it this way, you could have had $900 but you got this heifer instead.  It costs money and time to raise and maintain that heifer and it costs something to breed her…either by bull or by straw.  However, not all heifers breed so you need to reckon your heifer costs by the group.

Hope you’re keeping up here, David was moving pretty quickly.

Let’s ratchet up the cost of that heifer.  You ready?  I’ll relate David’s example.  Of a group of 30 heifers, 25 settle in your breeding window.  Of those 25 pregnancies, 20 wean calves.  Of those 20 heifers that brought in calves, 17 re-breed.  Those other 13 heifers don’t fit our program.  My cost per heifer is not reckoned per head…it’s divided over the 17 that were successful at breeding a second time.  If that’s too harsh for you, Chip Hines says to measure profit by the calf across your entire operation but when talking to David, I was specifically talking about development costs of a heifer.  He took it through the second pregnancy.  As time passes and you select for thrifty, fertile, long-lived cows you’ll have a higher rate of success weaning calves but you should probably count on culling 10% of your herd each year.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend those 17 heifers are built to last in the example below.

Starting at the beginning (where else?) you are paying $27,000 for 30 weaned heifers..maybe 6 months old.  You find a quality bull and pay $20 per head ($600) to have them bred at 15 months so they will calve at 24 months.  I’m choosing not to buy a bull to keep total costs at a minimum.  A bull eats every day, I need one for 6 weeks.  We could have started with 30 bred heifers for $45,000 which might be worthwhile if they were high quality animals.  More on that next time.  Keeping those 30 weaned heifers for 18 months (until calving) costs you another $22,500 but when you breed again you are down to 20 cows (the ones that calved).  The rest were sold as springing heifers who missed your breeding window or as open heifers.  Let’s say you can sell them for $1,200 each ($12,000).  After all of that we sold 20 heifer calves ($900 each) and 10 grown heifers for a total of $30,000 and it only cost us $50,100 to do it!  The heifers owe us $20,100.

But we have to breed our 20 remaining heifers.  That’s another $400.  17 of those breed in our window but we carry all 20 through the year.  Our cows only owe use $10,000 for maintenance this year.  We sell the 3 late breeders for $3,600 and sell our 17 calves for $15,300.  This year we’re doing all right making $8,900 so the cows only owe us $11,200.

When those heifers (all 17 of them) drop their third calves (in our fictional scenario) we’ll see another $15,300 with breeding costs of $340 and maintenance of 8,500.  We’re looking at $6,460 in profit as long as we can keep this thing running.  This year the herd only owes us $4,740.  Looks like the heifers will pay us back next year!

That’s why David says it takes four calves for a 6-year old to pay for her own development.  “Optimal economic return is in years 8-11 for commercial cow/calf operations.”  If she falls out at 6 years old we haven’t gotten ahead.  Every year she calves after 6 increases the desirability of her offspring.

The cattle market is a wild ride at times…who knows what the price will be next year.  Along with keeping my production costs minimal, I have to work to provide a quality product so I can make the numbers listed above.  I don’t think Gordon Hazard is paying $2/pound for calves, but he’s not buying calves of the quality under discussion here (small, British breeds, grass-genetic, long-lived).  We have always believed that it costs just as much or more to maintain a poor cow compared to a good cow but Hazard looks for the undervalued calf of any class, gets it to feedlot weight and sends it down the road.  We can’t sell into that market with the numbers presented above.  From what David described, he sells a fair number of culls and calves into the commodity market but sells 150 bulls each year for breeding stock to help make the numbers work.

Any business you start will require an investment and several years to achieve profitability.  A cow/calf operation is no exception.  Is it right for me?  My pastures are currently pretty poor quality.  Cows can get by on less than stockers…requiring a lesser quality pasture.  Right now, cows look like a good way to improve my pastures…but the climb to profitability looks pretty steep.

That wraps up most of page one of my conversation with David Hall.  Next time I’ll share my notes about buying or breeding genetics in your herd, stock selection, adding in other livestock types and keeping a job in town.  Let me know if you have any trouble with my math or if you have any questions or suggestions.  I want to emphasize, my goal here isn’t to discourage the raising of cattle.  I’m sharing my thoughts and research as I analyze the costs and work to put my farm and my time to its best and highest use.  You know…stewardship.

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Black Locust…Its’ What’s For Dinner

We have a large, old locust tree growing by the garden.  Really, it’s not doing well but it still flowers every spring and throws shoots from its root system.

Locust1I was recently listening to a podcast indicating cows would benefit from pastures planted with as many as 30,000 black locust and black walnut trees per acre.  Chew on that.  Now, I’m not talking about grazing under trees, I’m talking about grazing the trees themselves.  This blog does a good job of explaining and illustrating the concept.

I thought a little verification was in order.  As I said, the black locust throws up a number of shoots on a regular basis.  Since the pastures (including the yard) are being rested between grazings a number of trees have grown about a foot tall.

Locust2Here is another example from a different place in the yard.  Notice the short thorns.

Locust4I identified a couple of trees and turned the cows in while we clamped our bull calf.  It was like the cows had their radar turned on.  The almost sprinted over to the poor locust tree before moving on to a small stand of Johnson grass.  The tree was the first choice.  No wonder I don’t see them sprouting out in the pasture.

Locust3Now we’re looking at transplanting all the shoots we can find to a protected part of the pasture so we can allow them to develop.  Maybe I should plant them at the base of that dry hill…or in rows on contour to the hill.  Either way, I have sufficient confirmation that I’m willing to continue the experiment and propagate more trees.

Speaking of tree propagation, the chestnuts I harvested from Eileen’s house are sprouting in the garden.  Hope more show up.

Chestnut

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A Fair Amount of Bull

We bought our heifers from Moore Shorthorns in Jerseyville.  They also have a grass-raised, red, slick, small-framed (4-5), young, calving ease shorthorn bull.  Try saying that three times fast.  He’s fairly light and has good conformity.  He came from another nearby farm and, more than anything, he was raised on grass.  We asked if we could use him…for a small fee.

Bull1Tom delivered him Monday afternoon and he instantly detected that Flora was ready for service.  We had no idea.  No sooner was he unloaded than he was hard at work.  Well, here’s to hoping for a Shorthorn/Jersey cross.  Hope we get a bull calf….mmmmm…steak.

Bull2His disposition is good.  He doesn’t seem to mind us being around but we are still mindful of him.  He’s so busy chasing girls he doesn’t seem to notice us but we still keep an eye on him.  6 weeks from now he’ll go home and we’ll be back to our normal routine.  We’ll also get our two new additions at that time.  This little heifer:

RedHeifer

and this one:
WhiteHeiferBoth are small heifers compared to the rest of their graduating class, weighing 450 pounds at weaning.  I expect them to be 4 or 5 frame cows.  Tom had a giant shorthorn heifer that just won grand champion at the Madison county fair and will probably win again.  She was at least a 7 or 8 frame heifer and she’s due to calve in September.  I let him know I’ll soak up the smaller calves he produces…all high quality animals, just smaller-framed (In a grass operation, a cow has to eat a percentage of its weight.  That’s obviously easier if they are smaller.).  Tom’s show calves tend to be sold or selected the day they are born so I don’t even see them.  Really, Tom picked these two out for me ahead of time knowing what I’m looking for.

Hopefully this bull will throw small calves and, hopefully, the calves will be pre-adapted to performance on my pastures.  A few generations from now I should have just the cow we need.  Weather red, white or roan….she just has to be small.  Truth be told, I’m partial to red.

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What’s This Stuff For?

“What’s this stuff for?” my kids asked me.

RopeAndClamp“Well, Freezer was not a vigorous young calf.  We don’t want to allow him to become a bull.  So, today we’re going to make him a steer.”

I held the rope.  Julie held the tail up.  Steve used the clamp.  The kids got their answer.

Freezer went back to the pasture to be near mom.  Really not a big deal.

FreezerFreezer should turn a lighter color again soon.