- Okay, we're at another location on our virtual field day.
We really appreciate you sticking with us,
you know, earlier in an earlier session that we shot,
we were talking about the late summer fertilization
and utilizing cool seasons to...
To replace some supplementation cost
and using that cool season on limit grazings situation.
We got Brian back with me again,
Brian, on those cool seasons, I mean, they...
They are very good protein supplementation
and you utilized limit grazing,
only so much time per day or per every other day.
You had a schedule set up for these cattle.
What are some other ways to utilize some cool season forges
that would reduce expense of
supplementation cost for a producer?
- Okay, that's a good question.
You know, we were kinda limited
as far as acreage goes here at Perkins,
it's research station
and that's why we chose to limit graze again,
about a quarter acre per cow.
We did that on a time basis,
so we basically allowed cows to have access on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday for a two hour block of time.
And based on work that Dr. Dave Lawman has done in the past,
we figured that was about the amount of supplementation
that we wanted to get into them, forge.
- Right.
- Somewhere around 15 pounds every other day.
So about 7 1/2 pounds a day, a very high quality forge.
Our forge mix here in November tested about
24% crude protein and 71 TDN.
So again, you're looking at essentially a 20 in a bag--
- That's right.
- When it comes to supplement.
- Yes.
- So again, we were short of the amount of forage.
So we did limit graze, we used an automatic gate opener
that would basically pop the gate open at eight o'clock.
It had a bell on it.
Cows were trained in just the matter of two or three
grazing events.
And then we'd show up two hours later to push them out.
That's a great way to reduce labor.
It essentially reduced our labor by 50%,
'cause we didn't have to be here to let them in.
But if you don't wanna do that,
if that's too much management,
probably the ideal strategy to be honest from a...
From a cost standpoint is to have your
entire amount of acreage needed for that cow
and in that January, February, March timeframe,
as a cool season forage.
So that could be small grains pasture,
maybe we're closer to an acre or an acre and a half per cow,
small grain forage.
There's other options as we go East there's fescue,
people run over there
and they run cows on it the entire year.
So that would be more of a continuous graze
or slow rotational graze type system.
And again, we can stock pile fescue
the same way we stock pile the Bermuda grass
that we talked about this morning,
meet that cow's requirements
and go almost entirely through that winter grazing period.
- So what you're saying,
just like in the stock pile in the Bermuda grass,
we're utilizing a standing hay crop.
Well, we have a lot of producers here in this area
that a plant wheat and roll it up for hay.
All you're doing is utilizing it
as a standing supplementation.
- Sure.
- Protein supplementation crop.
- Sure.
- So--
- And that's the problem with the small grains pasture,
honestly is it's too good a quality.
You know, it's well over what a dry cow
or even a lactating cow needs.
So honestly, it fits the situation better to limit graze it,
to restrict the intake of that cow
and offer a little lower quality hay to that cow.
So again, there are a lot of different options
for producers that are interested in strategies
they might have, most of our county educators
can help them set up these year round grazing systems,
help them calculate the amount of forage they need.
And it'd be, you know,
a welcome addition to have them come in the office,
sit down with the county educator
and go over some of this data.
- So by using your timed application,
two hours every other day, so to speak, by doing that,
you also got better utilization
of the standing forage too.
- We did, yeah in the same way on the Bermuda grass.
We actually looked at that here Perkins year before last,
we compared to continuous graze versus a strip graze.
Our continuous graze, as most literature shows,
we were somewhere around 56% utilization
of that forage that we grew.
So in other words, 56% of what we grew,
we got in a cow's belly.
- Right.
- When we looked at a strip grazing event,
where we were moving the cows about every
three to five days, we were able to bump that up closer
to 70%, about 68% utilization.
So again, that's a huge change just in itself, to the...
The length of grazing time,
the X amount of forage lasts.
And we simply did that with moving
a single one hot wire fence around,
limiting the access the cows had to that grown forage,
to that stockpile forage.
- But actually by utilizing a limit graze for the cows.
And I'm not talking about stocker calves
that people just turn out on wheat pasture,
by limit grazing that, you're getting better utilization
and better value returned,
instead of just opening the gate and letting them have it.
- Definitely, yeah.
So again, you know, in a continuous graze scenario,
if we would have just allowed cows to have
free choice access to this through the winter,
you'd expect to maybe get 30 to 40% utilization
in that forage, but our intensive limit grazing
of this area, we were getting well over 80% utilization
of the cool season, small grain forage got here.
- So that's really good topics.
I appreciate you adding that, Brian.
- Thank you.
- Alright, Brian, thank you very much.
It's very interesting research that you're doing
and demonstrations.
It provides maximum savings for a lot of producers
to help watch the bottom line.
We really appreciate your input all across the state
and what you're done with this.
I'll let you make any final comments,
if you have any concerning your demonstrations
or some other topics you might wanna discuss.
- Well, I hope that answers the question
on how we graze those cows.
That was really a pretty innovative way to do that.
And again, limit the grazing
and reduce the amount of labor we had
by having that automatic gate timer.
Anybody who's interested in that in the future could show up
to some of the in-person field days and see that as well.
One thing that I would add
that we didn't really cover in the videos,
is that we've also been very diligent
to try to catch weights on these cows.
Anytime we go into a new forage species
or we come off of a forage species,
we're catching weights.
And all of that data will be in the handouts,
but I think it's pretty interesting to see,
we've done all this.
We've made these changes and saved this
significant amount of money,
but we've done it without hurting, cow-body condition.
Matter of fact, we've increased cow-body condition
compared to kind of our traditional strategy
and we haven't hurt re-breeding rights.
So that's really the name of the game, you know,
as far as my standpoint, working with producers,
I wanna save you money
and I don't wanna hurt your system at all,
as far as that re-breeding performance.
(chiming)