CONCEPTIONS Beef cow-calf route newsletter Nov Dec 2024
Mark Curry (989) 984- 7027
Route service and sales/ Ov Synch AI by appointment
Sue Palen (989) 277-
0480 Office manager/ advance
order desk/ products
Greg Palen (989) 277-
0631 Certified seed specialist/
Refresher AI training
Mich Livestock Service, Inc “For the Best in Bulls” “For the Best in forages”
110 N Main St
(PO Box 661) Ovid, MI
48866 *** phone (989) 834- 2661
Featuring sires through “Cattle Visions” Featuring “Byron Seeds” Kingfisher & Red Tail
In economics
classes we learned that the pricing of “commodities” always falls to the level
that clears the market of supply. In
most of agriculture, the industrial model of advice is “More yield solves all
financial problems”—which has never worked for us (increased production beyond
the quantity the market is prepared to use results in lowering prices to absorb
the yield increment).
Thus, the secret to profitable farm commodity production is to become a
least cost producer (rather than a maximum yield producer). This allows you to capture savings when
prices are good, to carry you through times when prices are not so good. (Savings allows you to put up bins to store
grain when you don’t like the current price, holding it from the market so as
not to force prices lower). (SAVINGS
ALLOWS THE CATTLE PRODUCER TO SELL LOWEST EQUITY VALUE ANIMALS WHEN PRICES ARE
LOW, RETAINING GROWTH EQUITY ANIMALS TO A FUTURE HIGHER VALUE.) Cost control allows you a chance of
profit whether prices are up or down.
It Is a perversity of government “cheap food” policy ( since FDR’s Great Depression) that whenever a farm product reaches a profitable price, the ag media says we have “high” prices – instead of being thankful that current prices allow farmers to rebuild equity and stay in food production for the 95% of people who do not grow any food for themselves!
Will profitable prices continue? The USA population of beef momma cows is at its lowest level since 1965. The USA human population is 50% larger today than it was then. As consumption of beef today “per capita” is nearly as high as it was in 1965, the national dairy herd (producing deacon bull calves to feedlot and cull cows for hamburger) has taken up the slack. This aided the grain markets in propping up corn and soybean prices, given feedlot feeding of “dairy beef” was focused on grain (rather than pasture and hay, the preferred steer feed for critters still on a farm).
Recently, the practice of breeding dairy cows to beef breed sires (to produce “premium” price deacon calves) is helping the expansion dairies generate non-milk cash flow to pay rising labor bills. In spite of “sexed” semen, it now appears there is a shortage of dairy replacements.
How does dairy farming affect beef production ?
Anyone who has a dairy farm, whether the industry would admit it or not, was also in the beef business. A ten million cow dairy population (prior to sexed semen) produced four million bull calves annually, ending up in feedlots. Prior to 2015, these Deacon bull calves generated $400 million in non-mik income! As dairy cows turned over after three calvings, you also had three million cows culled annually generating $500 million in non-milk income. Cull cows and deacon calves helped finance the large-herd replacement deficits, which was the biggest stimulus to the development of gender-selected semen! Smaller dairies with better reproduction and herdlife were always the source of surplus cows to keep the expansion dairies in supply; as they have been forced out, prices for replacements have risen to the $3000 mark, the highest-ever point in the history of modern dairy).
Value of deacon calves is four times what they used to be; salvage on culled dairy cows twice what they used to be. The deacon calf price has influenced 20% of dairy cows to be bred Beef, and with the national dairy herd down to Nine million cows (one million less than it has been for twenty five years!) you can see how all-time record prices for beef feeding and slaughter cattle have led the dairy breeding industry to acknowledge Beef selection for the first time ever.
Basically, for your operation, smaller national cow herds (both Beef and Dairy) means your cow herd is worth more than ever, and your calf crop worth more than ever before. Reproduction is the key to converting this value into farm income.
NOTE to
PUREBRED and SHOW BREEDERS: when
commercial (commodity) cattle prices go up, the cost of quality replacements to
improve your herd become more reasonable in comparison.
The biggest weakness in cow herds built on EBV or show type selection is often
related to lower natural fertility or more difficult calving. Now is the time to do culling
that improves your cow herd to regain maternal traits that
optimize reproduction and calving ease, and in selection for new cows, seek
longer reproductive life.
The
effect of grazing on financial returns to your land ownership
If you are a
cash-crop farmer with cattle “on the side” you are painfully aware of how the
runup in corn and soybean prices has run itself back down. As your cheapest land is what you rent, it
may still be profitable to plant row crops in rotation on that land; but for any land you own, the growing of
forages and the grazing of your cattle generates more profit than any “legal”
crop.
The math is really quite simple. If corn is $4.00 per bushel, and you are a good enough farmer to get 200 bushel per acre, you gross $800 per acre on corn, before all the costs. Those costs are considerable, as you know: seed, spray, fertilizer, fuel, machinery overhead, land rent…
If you return your “home” fields to grazing, dairy farmers have learned that high energy grasses generate $3000+ per dry matter ton in milk. You can get 2 to 3 tons dry matter per acre from a grass pasture rotated to keep it vegetative (which means more than two cuttings of hay…)
Producing quality
forage for cattle
within a grain
farming emphasis
Everyone knows the best corn crop you ever grow, is in that first year after
you rip up an old alfalfa stand. The soil
is full of accumulated nitrogen from the nodules on the alfalfa roots. The years away from row cropping have
rebuilt soil structure with organic matter, and those corn root borers and
other pests died or moved to other fields.
You can rotate annual forage crops like Winter Triticale between
corn and soybeans, planting as soon as your grain crop is harvested. Triticale will be ready to harvest as a
forage by mid-May (pre-seed heads) and your next corn planting will be
timely. The double crop insertion
feeds desired soil biology through the winter, increasing nutrient transport
capacity in the grain crop, and inhibits the overwintering of corn borer and
other corn-specific pests.
Consider this as your new seeding approach: Plant a Synergy X blend of alfalfa with a non-oat cover you can harvest green or wilt to bale in the same season. In the following year, once a year of clear alfalfa has passed, it will be producing root zone nitrogen; overseed high energy grass blends that will fill in open spaces between the alfalfa rows, and develop maximum tons of hay per acre. Once the field is half grass, fence it and graze it (maybe you just bale a first cutting and rotate graze the rest of the year). You can always frost seed red clover and cows will continue to see an optimal energy feed in front of them each season.
Whether you get five years or seven or ten years from this, you will be feeding an optimal feed to a maximum number of animals, while maintaining grain crop production in rotations as well as on your rental lands (which can always benefit from your winter-stored manure).
Why
rotate graze?
Dairy farms set up for haylage harvest in Michigan generally get three cuttings
in. Those with dry hay baling systems
only got two cuttings this year, most places. If you push alfalfa into a four-cut
season, you generally end up with only a three year stand life. Nationally, the alfalfa acreage has declined
from its peak, as big seed companies (owned by chemical companies!!) make a lot
more on chemically-dependent GMO row crops.
However, when it
comes to any farm feeding ruminants, the blend of legume alfalfa with high
digestible grass is ideal for any momma-cow operation, nutritionally superior
to corn silage and a lower cost per acre.
How
does rotation make the difference? We used to get six
passes per acre in grazing our cows, by keeping the grasses in a vegetative
(pre-seed head) state. Picking the
worst stand for that spring’s “sacrifice lot” (to get the cows outside for the
earliest grass), all the other pastures could be cut for first-crop hay, and
then rotate their regrowth for the remainder of the season.
First-cut hay would feed the cows all winter;
the sacrifice lot would get planted to a grazable summer annual (we liked
BMR-6 sudangrass) that could produce feed for the six weeks of
hot, dry summer when the grass pastures are slowed down and need to regenerate
roots.
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