WHO DO YOU WORK FOR ?

 

Are your cows working for you, or are you working for your cows?    In fact, do your cows make you work for the feed salesman, the seed salesman, fertilizer and spray salesman, tractor salesman, and farm lending system?

In understand it can be fun to be out riding a tractor (burning up $5.00 per gallon in diesel fuel and making payments to John Deere credit) when the weather is as warm and sunny as we are having --  but if your cows are unable to take some of the work load off you in the spring, summer and fall, you are not making money for your family, just for everyone else.

I understand there are bragging rights in 200-bushel corn and 80-bushel soybeans and the more you spend on them, the closer you get to those milestones.   But if the results of that are not impressing your banker, or your spouse, and if prices to replace all the iron sitting around the farmyard are scaring you, it is time to think over a  different cow-calf strategy, in favor of wholistic land management.

MIch Livestock Service, Inc ---    “For the Best in Bulls”    and fed by     “high energy forages”

MANAGING PASTURES FOR OPTIMUM FORAGE PRODUCTION

 

In the fall, make a decision which field will “winter” your cattle.    In general, the least value of your pastures should become the winter “sacrifice” pasture, where round bales can be unrolled for cows to eat (what they sleep on becomes soil-building organic matter) and then, while grass comes on in the spring, all the “pugging” of a wet pasture is contained in one field.

Plan on seeding summer annuals into the winter sacrifice pasture.    You may need to disc it over to smooth off all the pugging holes, but that makes a seed bed for sudangrass, sorghum- sudan crosses, or millet that (if seeded by early June) will be big enough to feed all your cattle during the heat of the summer when grass slows into near-dormancy growth (this will be very much a problem with this year’s dry spring conditions).    

As soon as soil is firm, move cattle into better pastures.     In fact, your smallest or irregular-shaped pastures need the cattle first, and here is why:   bigger pastures (rectangular shaped) can be bale harvest most easily.     With the weather conditions prevailing this spring, grass hay could have been cut by the 15^th of May.      By now they would have a good second growth and offer some early summer grazing before the summer annuals would be needed.

It is unsound harvesting to cut your alfalfa first.    Even the newest grasses will still push heads two weeks ahead of alfalfa first-buds.     Of you leave grass fields to bale last, you not only will sacrifice much of the protein content into the seed head, the plant may go dormant for most of the rest of the season.

Properly rotated vegetative grass may provide you six grazing passes per season per pasture.   This is twice the potential feed you are likely to harvest from a three-cutting hay making system.     It is our alfalfa-based approaches to hay making that are causing us to undervalue and underuse the fertility capability of a rotated, fertilized pasture system.

Unless you grow alfalfa to resell to dairy herds, do not worry about cutting it full bloom.    Early cut alfalfa is just too low in digestible fiber to be an optimal beef cow feed.    “Rocket fuel alfalfa” in a beef system is only of incremental benefit in feeding out finishing steers.    Grass is truly a more balanced forage feed than alfalfa, which grew to prominence only because when in combination with high energy corn it could appear to be a “balanced” ration on chemical tests.

The most profit in a beef cow-calf herd is to fully utilize the rumen.    Cattle raised on forages will develop a full digestive capacity from that forage, and with appropriate genetic selection on your cow genetics you can get growth, milk production for calves, and nice body conditioning without the need for a third to half the ration being corn and oilseed based.    Beef phenotypes should be selected for the ability to finish by age, not on weight gain from grain.   

What pays and what does not ?

 From:

CONCEPTIONS      Beef Cow-calf route newsletter              June-July 2023

 

Andy and Angus Arthur of Laingsburg have developed a successful grassfed beef marketing production system utilizing Angus, Hereford and “black baldy” crosses.
On a recent breeding visit, Andy mentioned that they tried some fly-repellent ear tags on cattle last year.    The feeder cattle going into winter hay feeding were 50# heavier with the fly tags than without.     They are thinking of trying them again.
 

How much does creep feeding and winter silage exaggerate EPDs?

As many of you are active grain farmers, the temptation to divert some of your corn crop into a corn silage supply for your cows for winter feeding is great.    You will of course be encouraged by most seed salesmen to do exactly that.   However, while corn (and soybean) prices still hold at record high price levels historically, and after the pandemic’s severe runup in fertilizer prices, we have to ask if this is a wise practice.

Most beef breeds were developed on grasslands grazing and winter hay feeding

The genetic instinct of animals is to live on what they were programmed to eat in mature.    For cattle, especially the English base breeds  (Angus, Red Angus, Hereford, Polled Hereford, Scotch Shorthorn, Murray Grey, and most “heritage” breeds of Highlander, Red Poll, Galloway, Dexter), corn was never part of their instinctual diets.     Thus when fed corn, it usually was metabolized as stored body fat, over muscle surfaces (not marbled), in mammary tissue, and around internal organs (kidneys, liver, uterine tract).     This fat has negative reproductive and health effects if too much accumulates, and in a broader sense, given it is just trimmed away in butchering, has no human food value—thus is a waste of your land and farming inputs compared to an effective pasturage and forage harvesting system.

High quality pasture that is treated like a crop  (ie, receiving some nitrogen fertilization after each grazing pass)  will not only regrow perennially but yield economically competitive volumes of feed.    No more than 2 acres per cow-calf unit of good, high energy variety perennial grasses in central Michigan will provide winter hay and spring/summer/fall feed, properly rotated.    The cows will rebreed more easily without being fat around the ovaries, and the heifers you save will calve much easier by not having excess fat packed into their pelvic structures pressing around the birthing canal.     

It seems to have developed primarily in the “continental breed” and “club calf” herds to believe that, either to produce higher EPDs for breeding stock sales, or fleshier calves for showing, that the cow herd has to be as “conditioned” as the sale and show stock.    This is not sound cattle breeding selection and has had many negative consequences, first in slower reproduction.
 

How early is it safe to preg check?

 With today’s ultrasound technology, pregnancies as early as 28 days can be seen on the monitor of the machine in the hands of a skilled operator (most vet clinics serving large animals may have one).      This is much earlier than safe times for a physical palpation (to avoid slipped membranes, vets prefer to wait 42 days).

If you follow a practice of early checks with ultrasound, the most economical way to fully confirm early pregnancies is to use a P Test strip from Emlabs.    Catch the urine stream under any cow bred 60+ days and you have a confirmation of status that is 99% accurate.     Should any cow have lost her pregnancy after the earlier (28- 42 day) ultrasound, the P Test will catch it.

Catch those repeat services

 By now most of you are either breeding or have completed a first round of AI>   
To have an idea of how you did, and if you desire to get another chance at some of your momma cows, consider applying Estrutech patches on the rumps of any you have serviced, or have not yet seen in heat.   

These have a gray surface that will rub off when a cow is persistently mounted, so a bright color (Red, Green, Yellow, several choices) will show.     If you check your herd every day, these will help you catch heats in a timely manner.
Another economical alternative is AI Paint, which we stock in yellow and green.

Mich Livestock Service, Inc     “For the Best in Bulls”   and   “High Energy forages”
110 N Main St   (PO Box 661)   Ovid,  MI  48866                          ph  (989) 834- 2661
www.michiganlivestock.com      email: greg@michiganlivestock.com       fax: (989) 834- 2914

What does it take to make pasture forages to enhance fertility ?

 

Start with the soil.    A pasture should be given the same fertilization care that you give to any row crop.    In fact, deep green colored pastures with a variety of plant species (grasses, legumes, forbs and brassicas) rotated so that they are vegetative (ie, not making seed heads and drying out) will produce as much harvestable feed nutrition as you can get from virtually any other crop (including corn silage).

The best pastures have “aerobic” soil—ie, there is enough root mass and organic structure to the soil that air can enter and rainfall can penetrate, keeping all the beneficial soil biology alive.    The best stimulant to soil biology also happens to be grazing animals across the surface, leaving behind saliva, urine and manure that is the natural food for the sort of soil life that transports nutrients into the root zone of whatever you are growing.

Consider the value of legumes in feeding atmospheric nitrogen into the root zone as well.    Clover (which starts fixing nitrogen in the year of seeding) is particularly good at this, as well as cows see clover as a tasty delicacy.   Alfalfa is less palatable in pastures, tends to lignify in summer heat, and does not produce nitrogen until the second year;  however, as alfalfa stands run out, interseeding grass and clover into them can transition a hay field into a pasture without tillage.    

Forbs are beneficial herbs that cows will eat selectively as their systems crave the minerals they are known to scavenge from the subsoil.    Likewise brassicas with their heavy top growth and often edible bulbs can be interseeded in late summer into existing pastures to provide an extra feed punch for a final fall pass.

The most vital grass seed breeding has been ongoing in Europe (where grass is used for hay, rather than alfalfa) and the varieties Byron Seeds brings from there have nutrient energy and protein profiles that exceed the best of alfalfas grown here.     As the alfalfa seed industry has peaked here, you will find grasses ready to take its place for either hay or haylage or balage harvesting systems as well as for pasturage.    

As all forage crops remove calcium, you can enhance soil fertility by using gypsum (sulfur) lime as a periodic fertilizer (perhaps every five years).

Fertility aids discovered

  CONCEPTIONS   Beef cow-calf newsletter            April May 2023

In Iowa there is a company called Em Labs which produces three products we stock:  P Test (strips to catch urine to detect pregnancy after six weeks post-breeding), Heifer Plus and its companion Bull Plus  which are enzymatic additives that influence the sex of the calf when using conventional (non-sorted) frozen semen.

Heifer Plus and Bull Plus have in various trials produced calf crops of 75% or more the desired sex – IF you do everything strictly according to the instructions.    If you go over the incubation times recommended, calf sex will go the other way from what you desired.    So these work, but are not guaranteed to work without an exact replication of the steps recommended.

However
It seems that, whether or not you get the sex desired in the calf, you do get a calf.    Fertility of semen seems to be enhanced by use of this product, and that is a consistent result.

Given many of you are shooting for a narrow calving window, a chance of improved conception is valuable.     Clitoral stimulation (page one) seems to add 10% to conception rates.   Using the sheath protectors (we stock two kinds) seems to gain another 5% at a minimal cost.    Now with the Em Lab “heifer plus” and “bull plus” options we might gain still another 10%.

For those of you using synchronization, which has never matched the conception rates that are possible from natural heats, these aids to conception are well worth considering.

 

We stock  C I D R s

They come in packages of ten, but if you only need a few, we will accommodate you.

We stock  “Estru Tech”  strips

They come in packages of 50, which are ten sheets with five strips on each sheet. 
Again, if you only need a few, we will sell individual sheets.

We stock  “tail paint”  in a variety of colors

Another economical tool, especially if you wish to catch repeats after a group breeding session.    Tail paint usually lasts the length of a heat cycle (three weeks) unless you get a hard rainfall.