As I write this book, the news is full of heart-wrenching stories of multi-generational dairy farms being foreclosed. It reminds me of when I took a group of beef production students to visit a dairy my cousins owned. When we arrived my cousin asked us why beef producers wanted to visit a dairy. I said that beef producers could learn a lot from the dairy industry, because typical dairy management is far more intense than typical beef management.
He replied that dairy producers could learn a lot from beef producers — that the dairy industry, producing a higher value of product per animal, has transitioned into a high-input-cost model of production. That works great when milk prices are high but proves disastrous when they are low. He said because beef producers face lower margins per animal, they are forced to look at lower-cost methods of production.
Perhaps my cousin was on to something that could potentially restore profit back into the dairy industry — moving away from the high-cost model of using machinery to feed the cows, toward letting the cows get their own feed by grazing.
The key to improving profitability of both beef and dairy is to reduce the cost of feed without sacrificing animal performance. The best way to do that is to increase the percentage of the feed supplied by pasture rather than by stored feed or supplements.
A cow’s nutrient needs shift according to her stage of calf production. Planning her nutrient needs to parallel forage availability will make an enormous difference in your bottom line.
One of the biggest barriers to profit is the choice to calve in seasons when green grass is not available. The cheapest high-quality forage is vegetative pasture. In my area, the predominant calving season is in February, when absolutely nothing grows, necessitating the use of high-quality (and expensive) stored feed.
Shifting the calving season to spring, rather than winter, has multiple advantages. Calves are less subject to thermal stress, scours are less of an issue, and the need for stored feed is dramatically reduced or eliminated. Dystocia (difficult birth) is less common, as warmer temperatures reduce calf size at birth and increase cow and calf vigor. Since day length is longer, a higher percentage of births occur in the daylight. The calving season should coincide with the beginning of the high-quality forage season, because the 3 months after calving are the highest nutrient need period of the cow year.
One of the biggest drawbacks to May calving — my own practice — is that breeding occurs in late July and August, the hottest time of the year. It is important that animals have access to shade, and I have chosen to use heat-tolerant Senepol genetics to aid breeding performance.
There is no one good, universal choice for a weaning date or age. Early weaning is becoming popular for many reasons and is increasingly advocated by university animal scientists. One plus of early weaning is that the dry cow can then utilize ultracheap (but low-quality) dormant native grass for forage in the fall and winter.
I have chosen to go the opposite direction and wean at 10 months of age. I believe the quality and availability of forage should dictate the date of weaning, and my strategy works as long as there is high-quality feed available during the entire lactation. Using fall-planted cover crops and stockpiled tall fescue makes extended lactation work for me.
If the forage quality is poor, leaving the calves on the cow will accomplish nothing but drag the cow down in body condition and will not put gain on the calf, either.
Nutrition Needs in the Cow Year |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Production Stage |
Duration in Months |
Nutrient Needs |
|
Postcalving to breeding |
3 |
Very high |
|
Breeding to weaning |
0–7 |
High |
|
Weaning to 60 days prior to calving |
0–7 |
Very low |
|
60 days prior to calving |
2 |
Moderate |
Ordinarily calves are sold soon after weaning. One profitable strategy is to hold these calves over for grazing during the spring flush the following growing season. Disease issues are a risk with purchased calves, primarily the “shipping fever” complex of respiratory diseases usually brought on by the stress of weaning, transport, and adaptation to new surroundings. Using homegrown calves eliminates much of the disease risk inherent in purchased stockers and allows you to utilize excess forage growth typical of spring and early summer to add very cheap gain to the animals prior to sale. Having part of the grazing pressure consisting of easily disposable stockers allows flexibility to adapt to weather conditions. If drought occurs, it is an easy matter to sell the stockers a little earlier than planned. The pasture is protected from overgrazing, and no tears are shed.
|
Example of active ingredients |
|
|---|---|
|
Avermectins |
Ivermectin, doramectin, moxidectin, abamectin, anything else that ends in “-ectin” |
|
Organophosphates |
Chlorpyrifos, coumaphos, diazinon, dichlorvos, ethion, fenthion, phosmet, pirimphos-methyl |
|
Pyrethroid |
Cyfluthrin, permethrin, pyrethrin, zeta-cypermethrin, anything else that ends in “-thrin” |
|
Pyrazole |
Tolfenpyrad |
While pastures in general are healthy environments for cattle, some problems seem to afflict cattle on pastures and may require preventive measures.
Flies that affect cattle on summer pasture include horn flies, face flies, stable flies, and tabanids such as horseflies and deerflies.
Horn flies breed in fresh cattle manure and feed on the backs of cattle, drawing blood several times a day. They remain on the cattle most of the time, making them susceptible to insecticide measures applied directly to the animals. Fly tags, sprays, and backrubbers or oilers historically have been used with success, as well as systemic pour-on insecticides.
These measures were at one time quite successful, but horn flies rapidly developed resistance to many of the insecticides used to control them, beginning with pyrethroid insecticides. Managing insecticide resistance became a great challenge in controlling these flies.
Ways to control these flies now include:
Rotate insecticide classes. The table below illustrates chemical classes of insecticides. If you choose to utilize insecticides, it is essential to look at the active ingredient in the product, and be sure to rotate chemical classes, not just products. It does no good to rotate between two pyrethroids, since resistance will soon develop.
Use insect growth regulators (IGR) in the mineral to suppress fly development in the manure. IGR used at labeled rates appears to have minimal effect on dung beetles, though it may have negative effects on other dung-consuming insects.
Encourage dung beetles, and avoid materials that kill them. Dung beetles can greatly reduce horn fly populations by consuming and burying manure, as evidenced in the table. A key factor in protecting dung beetles is to avoid the use of ivermectin during the time dung beetles are active. Ivermectin, and to a lesser degree other similar compounds, makes the manure of animals toxic to dung beetles.
Use a horn fly trap. This device has been shown to reduce horn fly populations by about 50 percent.
Use cattle genetically selected for horn fly resistance. Zebu breeds such as Brahman have better resistance than English and Continental breeds, as do many African breeds, particularly Senepol and other breeds derived from the African N’Dama breed. But within every breed and every herd there are individual animals with more resistance to flies and individuals with less resistance to flies. Selecting and culling animals based on fly problems can make a great difference over time.
Face flies are harder to control than horn flies. Face flies feed not on blood but on the tears of animals, and they have sharp mouthparts that cause microscopic lacerations on the eye to increase the secretion of tears. This process also is a major factor in the spread of pinkeye.
Since face flies also breed in manure, many of the same measures used to control horn flies also are effective on face flies, particularly a good dung beetle population. Insecticide-impregnated ear tags and insecticide-soaked face mops are also particularly effective.
Stable flies are usually a pest of barnyards and seldom a problem out on pasture. They breed in old hay piles and thus are concentrated around winter feeding areas. Stable flies tend to bite the legs of animals. Animals attacked by stable flies often seek relief in a mud puddle, where they can stand and stomp up and down and splash to keep the flies off temporarily, but this tends to destroy the vegetation of that small area of the pasture.
The bite is quite painful, and the flies bite people as well. They seem to prefer to attack when you have both hands full and cannot swat them.
The preferred method to control these nasty pests is to remove their breeding habitat, which is usually a place where big round hay bales were fed and not cleaned up by the animals. Keep hay feeding spread out so there is never a big pile of hay in any one spot. Better yet, manage so that you do not have to feed hay, and stable flies are solved altogether.
Another option is to purchase fly predators, tiny wasps that parasitize the pupae of stable flies. They are very effective if applied according to directions.
How Dung Beetles Can Control Flies |
|
|---|---|
|
Number of dung beetles per dung pat |
Number of flies per dung pat |
|
No beetles/pat |
90.7 |
|
10 pair dung beetles |
7.5 |
|
20 pair dung beetles |
0.0 |
|
Table 17.1. Source: G. F. Bornemissza. Insectary Studies on the control of dungbreeding flies by the activity of the dung beetle Onthophagus gazella. Australian Journal of Entomology, April 1970 |
|
Horn fly trap
A horn fly trap works on the “inverted cone” principle. Flies are brushed off the cattle and fly toward sunlight through slits in the “valleys” of the pleated inner screen and become trapped between the inner and outer screens.
Tabanids, such as horseflies and deerflies, have painful bites and can spread anaplasmosis. They breed not in manure but in ponds, where the larvae have an aquatic stage.
These large flies are hard to control with insecticides. Cultural control involves keeping animals out of ponds. This increases the distance flies have to travel to find the animal. The major predators of tabanid larvae include dragonfly larvae and fish. If cattle are allowed free access into ponds, they create muddy conditions. As a result, you will see very few dragonfly larvae or fish in ponds, and a lot of tabanids.
Animals do not need to stand in a pond to drink water from it. See chapter 13 for more information on developing drinking water.
Foot rot, or hoof rot, is a fungal infection of the area between the two toes that make up the hoof of an animal. It can become a serious problem, in which animals become lame, making it difficult to gather enough food to maintain condition or get enough water.
It often begins with a mechanical injury, often during icy or muddy conditions, when a sharp object in the ice or mud becomes embedded between the toes. A good means of prevention, therefore, is to make sure any gathering areas, such as watering points, remain dry and free of any sharp objects. Using gravel pads over geotextile on high-traffic areas can greatly reduce foot rot. Woodchips spread over high-traffic areas is similarly helpful.
An effective treatment and prevention is to lead the animal through a foot bath containing copper sulfate or zinc sulfate. This foot bath can also transfer some copper and zinc fertility to the pasture via the hooves.
Antibiotic treatments are effective, but prevention is always a better route. Nutrition seems to be linked to foot rot, since animals deficient in zinc, copper, and iodine seem more susceptible. A pasture with a high population of mineral-rich forbs such as chicory will often have fewer foot rot issues than a monoculture grass pasture.
How Supplemental Zinc Helps Control Foot Rot |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Foot rot % |
Control |
|
|
Added zinc methionine in mineral |
5.38% |
2.45% |
|
Table 17.2. Source: F. K. Brazle, 1993. Cattleman’s day report of progress Bulletin 704. Kansas State University |
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An infection of the eyes caused by the bacteria Moraxella bovis, pinkeye is often spread by face flies; control is an important factor in prevention. Although some vaccines are available, there are literally hundreds of strains of the pinkeye bacteria, and vaccines prevent, at best, only a few of them.
Preventing mechanical injury to eyes is important as well, when your grazing pastures have plants with multiple protruding seedheads. Rotational grazing to maintain even grazing pressure and prevent seedhead formation is helpful, as is mowing (although it is expensive) to remove seedheads if they develop. A mineral feeder with an integral insecticide-impregnated cover is very helpful, even if the pad is just soaked with mineral oil.
An old veterinarian told me he cured pinkeye just by throwing salt into the eyes of afflicted animals. It seems that getting salt in the eyes as the animal feeds on salt seems to suppress pinkeye all by itself, because salt becomes attached to the pad and drops into the eyes during feeding. The flushing effect of tears as the animal tries to move salt out of the eyes seems to prevent the bacteria from gaining a foothold.
Treating animals with injectable antibiotics is effective treatment, as is topical antibiotic applied right to the eye. Be sure to consult a veterinarian before application of any antibiotic.
It is helpful to cover the affected eye with a patch of denim glued to the forehead; the condition is very painful and makes the eye sensitive to sunlight. Patching greatly increases animal comfort and also prevents face flies from spreading the infection to other animals.
Susceptibility to pinkeye is genetically linked, so be sure to cull any animals that develop the condition.
Pinkeye is a painful condition, spread by the feeding of face flies.
Also called calfhood diarrhea, scours is the leading cause of calf death, the primary factor in about 50 percent of all preweaning losses in cow herds. Even if calves survive, the damage to their systems often results in dramatically reduced performance for the rest of their lives. Vaccination can be somewhat helpful, but scours can be caused by multiple organisms, including those for which there is no available vaccine. Causes include bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella, viruses such as coronavirus and rotavirus, and protozoans such as Cryptosporidium.
Antibiotic treatments are ineffective for many causal organisms. The most effective treatment is to bottle-feed the calf (or use a stomach tube if it will not take a bottle) with an electrolyte solution twice a day.
Death from scours is actually from dehydration and acidosis, not from the disease organism itself. A calf with scours will often require a gallon of additional fluid and electrolytes per day. The electrolytes are critical, because scours causes a loss of them, and without replacement the body will go into an acidic state, killing the animal. Likewise, the water is critical to prevent dehydration.
It is easy to diagnose dehydration in a calf. Just take a pinch of skin between your thumb and forefinger and pull it out. If the skin snaps back readily, the calf is hydrated. If it remains “tented” and only slowly returns to shape, then the animal is dehydrated and needs immediate fluid. If the eyeballs are sunken, then the calf is dehydrated to the point that it needs immediate fluid, and a lot of it, to prevent death.
As with all other maladies, prevention is the best route. Scours are prevented best by the following:
Ensure calves receive adequate colostrum after birth. Make sure to babysit animals during the birthing process, and be ready to assist any calves that lack the vigor to nurse soon after birth. Alternatively, schedule calving for when it is warm and the mothers are on green grass, so the youngsters are naturally vigorous and don’t need babysitting services.
Limit new calves’ contact with the manure of older calves. Scour organisms seem to reach a peak in population within an animal at about 2 weeks of age, and a newborn in the vicinity of a 2-week-old calf is likely to receive a massive dose of scours organisms. Two weeks later it will likely be very sick itself and infect calves born at that time.
One way to prevent contact with older calves is the Sandhills calving method. This involves moving all cows that have not calved to a fresh pasture at weekly intervals. Cows that have calved can themselves be either left in the same pasture or moved to a fresh (but different from the yet-to-calve cows’) pasture. This procedure takes multiple pastures, but a management-intensive rotational grazing system will have multiple paddocks that can be used in this manner.
Another method is simply to keep the animals moving on a daily basis, so contact with any manure is limited. A very big help in reducing manure contact is to not have a central watering location, but instead to have watering locations in each paddock.
Reduce stress on newborn calves. Since cold and wet conditions are the biggest stressors for a newborn, shifting calving to warmer weather eliminates this stress.
Keep cows out of mud and manure. Muddy or manure-covered udders are one of the biggest transmitters of scours organisms to the calf. Use geotextile and gravel or woodchip pads around watering locations and provide bedding if needed to give cows a dry place to lie when it turns very wet. See chapter 14 for more information.
Go ahead and vaccinate. Although it will not prevent all scours organisms, just preventing a few of them will give calves a much better fighting chance. It will take only a 1 percent improvement in the number of live calves to pay for vaccination of the herd.
When people hear the term “grass-finished beef,” they all too often think of a tough, dry piece of meat that is nearly inedible, because all too much of the beef produced on pasture alone is tough and dry. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is entirely possible to produce excellent-tasting, tender, and juicy beef on pasture alone, but it is important to pay attention to some important details.
There is a huge difference between “grass fed” and “grass finished.” Any animal grazed on grass pasture is “grass fed,” but only those achieving a certain carcass merit can be considered to be “grass finished.” This carcass merit is achieved by having an acceptable level of intramuscular fat, or marbling, to impart juiciness and flavor to the meat. This is only achieved under certain conditions.
The first item of business is to choose the proper genetics for grass finishing. Although nearly every breed has individuals that can produce high-quality beef on grass alone, those individuals are more numerous in the English breeds of cattle such as Angus, Hereford, and Devon. Just choosing one of those breeds does not guarantee the presence of good grass-finishing genetics, but it increases the odds. Ideal grass-finishing animals tend to be early maturing, smaller framed, and easy fleshing.
The second item is to prevent any stress during the calf’s first week — nutritional, emotional, or thermal stress. The essential marbling cells, the fat cells inside the muscle tissue that provide the juiciness and flavor, are formed during the first week. A calf that is dropped in a mudhole or snowbank likely will never produce good-quality meat, even with grain feeding. A calf with frozen ear tips is a poor candidate for grass finishing.
The third item is to provide adequate quality nutrition every day of the animal’s life, so that the animal gains at least 1.75 pounds per day. When gains drop below this level, the animal will cannibalize its own fat cells to maintain growth, and the marbling cells are the first ones used. It often takes a year and a half to 2 years to finish a calf on grass, so we are talking either two growing seasons and a winter, or two growing seasons and two winters. It is easy to have excellent animal performance during the first growing season, while the calf is on the cow, because mother’s milk is a great nutritional supplement to the available grass, which is usually of good quality during the growing season.
The first nutritional challenge is winter, when few grasses provide quality grazing. There are a few methods to maintain good calf gains during winter.
The first is to leave the calf on the cow for an extended lactation so the milk buoys up the nutritional plane of the calf, while the mother is fed hay or supplement. It is important to realize that this approach requires high-quality hay, and a lot of it, as a lactating cow with a big calf will eat twice as much as a dry cow, and the hay must be much higher quality than necessary for a dry cow. Ordinary grass hay will not do; it must be better-quality hay, such as alfalfa, with a relative feed value of 130 or better (160 or better is considered “dairy quality”).
An alternative to feeding hay is to use pastures of stockpiled tall fescue, which can provide adequate quality to maintain a milking beef cow through the winter. It is critical, however, that the fescue be an endophyte-free or “friendly endophyte” variety, and NOT endophyte-infected Kentucky 31 fescue. Endophyte-infected fescue creates a toxin that causes a disorder called fat necrosis, which results in a rancid flavor to the meat, as well as poor animal performance. See “Learn from My Mistakes” above for a full story.
Another approach is to provide supplemental pastures of cool-season annuals that provide better cool-season nutrition than dormant perennial pastures. Cover crop blends of winter cereals (wheat, barley, oats, rye), annual ryegrass, brassicas (turnips, radishes, collards), and winter clovers (arrowleaf, crimson, balansa) provide impressive gains during open winters. It may be necessary in some regions to have a supply on hand of high-quality hay to maintain gains when muddy or snowy weather does not permit grazing.
The next challenge to providing quality nutrition over the entire lifetime is the final stage of finishing, when the energy needs of the animal are extremely high. Muscle tissue is 80 percent water; thus most of the gain is water weight when the animal puts on muscle. When an animal deposits fat, however, that fat contains no water, and each pound of fat takes 2.25 times the energy to produce as a pound of muscle dry matter. Do the math, and it takes 12.25 times the energy intake to put a pound of fat on an animal as a pound of muscle. Most of the gain after an animal reaches 900 pounds is fat, and this explains why animal gains often slow down after that point without grain feeding.
It is critical that at this point the animal receive only the highest-quality pasture. While there is much discussion about the best species of pasture plant to use at this point in the animal’s life, a more important item is to consume pastures that are in their vegetative stage of growth (not too mature) and to maintain a very light stocking rate, which allows animals to select the most nutritious plant parts (the leaves) without forcing them to eat stems. This can be best accomplished by careful observation of what the animals are eating. A diet of pure leaves can often produce gain similar to a grain-based diet, close to 3 pounds of gain a day. A diet of pure stems is usually only good enough to maintain weight.
What the animal actually gains is highly dependent on what percentage of their diet they are forced to consume as stems. An animal targeted for grass finishing should be managed to eat a leaf-only diet during the period prior to harvest. That being said, it is true that some forages are simply higher energy than others.
In general, the highest-energy cool-season forage is annual ryegrass, and the highest-energy summer forages are brown midrib varieties of corn, sorghum-sudan, and pearl millet. Brassicas are also high energy and are excellent during the growing phase but can cause off-flavors in meat and should be avoided during the last few weeks prior to harvest.
Tropical warm-season grasses such as bermudagrass are usually too low in energy for satisfactory finishing, but native warm-season grasses such as big bluestem, Indiangrass, and buffalograss can provide excellent gains during early summer, though their quality drops in late summer.
Cool-season perennial grasses — orchardgrass, smooth bromegrass, Kentucky bluegrass and the like — can provide adequate gain in spring and fall but are unacceptable in the heat of midsummer. Perennial ryegrass is the highest-energy cool-season perennial, but it lacks heat and drought tolerance so should not be the sole species in a pasture where heat and drought are concerns.
Cereals such as wheat and rye are very good in spring and fall but are much better when combined with annual ryegrass for added energy. Legumes and forbs are usually high in protein but are lower in energy than grasses; that does not mean they don’t have a value in grass finishing, however, just that they are not a “stand-alone” pasture. Legumes and forbs digest very rapidly, meaning animals will eat a higher amount of a diet containing legumes and forbs than one without and thus gain faster on a blend of high-energy grasses with legumes and forbs.
The best animal performance results from animals being able to select a diverse diet. Animals tire of a diet composed of only one species, no matter how good that species may be. A varied menu enables animals to select some plants for energy and other plants for protein, others for minerals and possibly for other compounds such as tannins. It has been demonstrated over and over that animals perform best on pastures that contain a nice balance of grasses, legumes, and forbs (chicory, plantain, native wildflowers).
It is difficult to grass finish animals on only one pasture type, because no one species of forage maintains high quality in all time periods. The best results come from a sequence of winter annuals, then cool-season perennials, then warm-season perennials, then warm-season annuals, then back to cool-season perennials, then winter annuals. Obviously, this will not be available in all situations but could be a goal. Here’s a suggested calendar of sequential pastures for grass finishing, based on my area in the central region of the country.
Early spring: A blend of winter annual cereals (rye, barley, oats, wheat), annual ryegrass, winter legumes (crimson clover, winter peas, balansa clover, medics), and brassicas (turnips, collards, radishes).
Late spring: A blend of cool-season perennial grasses (meadow brome, orchardgrass, endophyte-free or friendly-endophyte tall fescue, matua brome, or bluegrass) with legumes (alfalfa, red clover, ladino clover, bird’s-foot trefoil, sainfoin), and forbs (chicory and plantain).
Early summer: Warm-season native pastures, preferably with the full natural component of wildflowers and native legumes. If these are missing due to past herbicide applications, interseed small amounts of alfalfa and sweetclover to add protein and diversity. If native pastures are not available in your area, seed a native grass or Eastern gamagrass pasture. Subtropical grasses such as bermudagrass are acceptable but inferior to the native warm-season grasses. Animals harvested off native grasses during the green season have a reputation for excellent flavor.
Late summer: A blend of summer annual grasses (brown midrib grazing corn, brown midrib dwarf sorghum-sudangrass, brown midrib pearl millet, Japanese millet, teff), plus summer annual legumes (cowpeas, forage soybeans, sunn hemp, guar) and warm-season forbs such as okra and sunflower.
Fall: This is a time to go back to cool-season perennial grass/legume/forb mixtures, along with winter annual cover crops of cereals, ryegrass, clovers, and brassicas.
Winter: This is when stockpiled endophyte-free or novel endophyte fescue is valuable, if you are in an area in which winter annuals go dormant in winter. In the southern states, where cereals and annual ryegrass grow all winter long, these species are preferred.
It is not essential to follow the sequence above to grass finish, and many people who wish to grass finish will not have access to all the pasture types listed. This is merely one highly successful sequence used by innovative grass finishers. It is possible in nearly all areas to create a sequence of high-quality pastures utilizing both warm-season and cool-season species that can provide quality nutrition nearly year-round. To summarize, here are the keys to successful grass finishing:
At one time, prior to the development of large specialized feedlots, beef animals were commonly finished by feeding a grain ration on pasture. As consumers increasingly find feedlots objectionable, but still like the flavor of grain-fed beef over grass-fed, grain-on-grass may make a comeback. There are several advantages of this system:
The biggest disadvantage of this system is that the entire marketing system for grain-finished beef is centered around large feedlots and packing plants. Unlike grass-finished beef, there is likely to be no premium for grain on grass, unless it is produced and marketed as antibiotic-free, hormonal-implant-free beef. If someone were to pursue this avenue, I would recommend first establishing a market for the product.
Before the development of self-propelled grain combines, harvesting corn was a laborious process. A very good corn picker could harvest about 1 acre of corn a day, given the per-acre yields of the day of 30 bushels or so. If you have ever hand harvested much corn, you know that is an impressive feat. In those days they not only walked 5 miles to school uphill (both ways!), but they also worked their tails off picking corn.
As impressive as that was, it pales in comparison to the thousands of bushels per hour that a modern grain combine can harvest. Picking corn now may involve long hours, but it is no longer physically demanding. It is so easy to do now (as long as you have a really, really big checking account to buy a combine) that no one really thinks there is any other way to harvest corn.
When picking corn was hard work, it was commonplace to either “hog down” or “cattle down” the corn, by turning animals into standing grain to harvest it. This system had many advantages, but the high amount of trampled and wasted feed in the process resulted in its being phased out in favor of mechanical harvest.
Our system of fattening animals now works something like this:
We have a pasture full of beef calves. In the fall, these calves are caught and put on a $100,000 semitrailer that delivers them to a feedlot in western Kansas.
Across the fence from this pasture is a cornfield. In the fall, a $500,000 combine pulls into this field, dumps the grain onto a $100,000 grain cart pulled by a $100,000 tractor, which dumps it into another $100,000 semi, which takes the grain to the local $10,000,000 grain elevator, which burns propane to dry it down for safe storage, then puts it onto a $10,000,000 train, which delivers it to the feedlot in western Kansas, which feeds this grain to the calves from across the fence, which turn it into beef and manure, which the feedlot scrapes up with a $100,000 tractor loader and dumps onto a $100,000 spreader truck, which delivers and spreads it onto some field in western Kansas just to get rid of it.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, the farmer takes a third of his corn check and uses it to buy fertilizer to replace the nutrients now in the manure in the western Kansas field. The other two-thirds go to pay his machinery note, fuel, and repairs.
We developed this system because we are “efficient.”
A hundred years ago, the farmer accomplished this same objective by opening a gate.
Granted, the mere opening of the gate and letting animals eat as they may was not a good system. The animals were predisposed to acidosis from excessive grain intake without being gradually adjusted to starch intake. Unregulated access to the field made for a lot of trampled plants and grain loss, especially in muddy weather. But by adapting modern technology, we can greatly improve on the efficiency of the 1920 version of cattling down corn.
The first important piece of technology that allows modernization of cattling down corn is portable electric fencing. The waste and trampling that resulted from allowing access to the entire field can now be largely eliminated through rationing out one day’s worth of feed at a time. The acidosis can be prevented by the portable fence as well, by starting the animals on only a small field allowance that forces them to eat mostly leaves or supplemental hay during the initial grain adjustment period.
A second piece is the use of a rumen microbial inoculant, called Lactipro, which is composed of the bacteria we try to gradually culture during the grain-adjustment period. By dosing an animal with this inoculant, they are essentially instantly adjusted to a full feed of grain. It is still advisable to go through at least some adjustment period, but a great measure of forgiveness is acquired.
A third improvement is the use of no-till technology, so that instead of a loose, bare soil subject to intense trampling during muddy weather, we have a firm, well-drained sod-like condition that holds animals up even during wet weather, minimizing trampling.
A fourth improvement is the use of cover crops spread into cornfields prior to harvest, to provide additional high-protein feed to complement the high-energy but low-protein grain. Actually, this is again a rediscovering of an old technique, as it was actually common at the turn of the last century to use horse-drawn grain drills that fit between the 40-inch-wide corn rows of the time to plant three or four closely spaced rows of wheat and have it developed enough by the time the corn grain ripened to withstand pasturing. Other fields might have a crop of pumpkins, cowpeas, or velvet beans planted at last cultivation in the corn.
Many farmers are now using these same techniques to provide additional feed after corn harvest when pasturing stalks, but they could also be used to provide additional feed when cattling down corn. Some cover crops are planted into corn at the V3 stage, so that they develop a root system prior to the corn’s forming a closed canopy. Another method is to aerial seed cover crops into corn around the time of black layer (when the grain has matured but not yet dried down enough for harvest).
Finally, there have been machines developed that walk through tall corn at black layer, spread cover crop seed, and cut the tops of the plants just above the now-mature ears so the tops drop to the ground as a mulch on top of the seed. This increases the amount of sunlight to the developing seedlings, and since the ears are now exposed to sun and wind, this speeds drydown of the corn so harvest can occur earlier and allow even more sunlight down to the seedlings.
A fifth technique is to plant corn into a living mulch, a chemically suppressed sod of a spreading, low-growing perennial grass or perennial legume combination like Kentucky bluegrass, white clover, or kura clover. The sod is sprayed prior to corn planting, and the corn is no-till planted; the sod gradually recovers by the time the corn is mature so that it can provide a high-protein supplement to the grain. Surprisingly good corn yields have been attained in this system.
I don’t know why people just automatically assume it is economically superior to harvest the corn by the method described above. Let me point this out. Packing plants tell feedlots what they will pay for finished beef animals. The feedlot then figures in their overhead cost, plus the cost of their feed (mostly the 55 bushels of corn it takes to convert a 750-pound feeder steer to a 1,350-pound fat animal), then tells the cow-calf producer or stocker producer what they are willing to pay for a feeder calf. The current price of corn is always figured into the fat calf/feeder calf spread in price. Thus, the value of the gain always will exceed the value of the corn.
Take a couple of factors into account: first, there are no harvest costs, transportation costs, drying costs, or feeding cost involved with the grain in this system; second, all the manure is deposited right where it will benefit the next crop with no spreading costs whatsoever.
If you are not convinced, take the value of a fat calf (currently about 1,350 pounds times $1.25 a pound, or roughly $1,690). Subtract the value of a feeder calf (currently about 750 pounds times $1.50 a pound, or roughly $1,125) and you get about $565. This is the value of the 55 bushels of corn that calf will eat in the cattling down system, or about $10.25 a bushel. Right now, corn at the elevator is bringing about $3. Add in the advantage that you do not have any mechanical harvest costs and the fact that you get your fertilizer back as manure, and it makes me wonder why this is not the status quo for fattening cattle.
This method of finishing cattle has been researched by multiple universities from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast to Hawaii and in every case has been found economically superior to finishing in a feedlot, but it has yet to catch on. Perhaps we have been so indoctrinated by the idea that we have to use machinery to do everything that we have a hard time swallowing the idea that another way could be more efficient.
At one time, all dairies in the United States were pasture based, just like all other livestock enterprises. In the 1950s, however, when concrete, steel, and fuel were cheap, it seemed to make economic sense to use machinery to do for a cow what she can easily do for herself: eat and spread manure.
Putting cows in confinement was seen as more efficient and more modern than pasture-based systems. Pasture-based systems were limited in how many animals they could support by the amount of pasture they could grow; confinement systems had no such ceiling, because they could just import more feed. Confinement systems could also increase the number of animals one person could manage, especially after the advent of the automatic milking machine. Confinement allowed expansion and more total production per cow with the advent of total mixed rations. By the 1980s, virtually all dairies were confinement.
But one place that pasture-based dairy has always held an advantage over confinement is perhaps the most important one: cost per hundredweight of milk. When milk prices become very low, as they are prone to do, the dairy with the lowest cost of production wins. As costs of concrete, machinery, and fuel have risen, pasture-based dairy is making a comeback.
Another factor that has spurred this renaissance is the development of modern rotational grazing systems that can provide the all-important consistency of nutrition necessary for optimizing milk flow. Inconsistent nutrition from day to day will result in a dramatic lowering of milk flow to that of the lowest level of nutrition during that period, and when the nutritional level increases, the milk flow does not recover, instead, the cow puts that additional energy into backfat.
Moving animals daily or twice daily following milking to ensure consistency of nutrition goes hand in hand with pasture-based dairy systems, and it is in these that grazing management has reached its zenith.
The superior profitability of pasture-based dairy over confinement dairy is evidenced by the fact that dairies in other countries did not necessarily follow this trend toward confinement. In New Zealand, for example, pasture-based dairies still rule the landscape, and pasture management technology evolved to be extremely efficient. Pasture-based dairying in New Zealand is so lucrative that land values there for pasture are now several times what even the best of cropland sells for in the United States, and many New Zealand dairies have moved to the United States to obtain land at more reasonable prices.
Pasture systems also enjoy an advantage in cow longevity, as pasture soil is easier on hooves and joints than concrete floors. There are potential marketing advantages for dairy products raised in a pasture-based system, due to real or perceived improvement in nutritional quality or consumers simply wanting to support what they feel is a more humane or environmental method of raising livestock.
The desired animal genetics for pasture-based dairy might be different from that for confinement systems. A New Zealand Holstein looks different from an American Holstein. Some of the most successful producers use a crossbred animal, such as a Holstein-Jersey cross, to take advantage of heterosis. These smaller-framed animals tend to have shorter gestation lengths and rebreed much easier, which makes keeping them on a schedule of calving each year at the same time much easier.
Another feature that is gaining popularity is leaving the calves on the cow after birth rather than confining them to a hutch and feeding them milk replacer. The calves gain better, are healthier, strip the teats better than any human can to reduce mastitis, and learn from their mothers how to be a cow on pasture if they are intended replacements. This practice also has a much better public perception than the ultraearly weaning typical of dairies.
One disadvantage of pasture is that in temperate regions there is no green pasture during the winter. One way to get around this is to freshen all the cows at once at the beginning of pasture season and dry them all up at the end of pasture season — so-called seasonal milking. This offers many advantages in both cost of milk production and in lifestyle. It allows a much needed vacation that many dairy producers would otherwise never get, and that vacation may be scheduled during the winter when no livestock production is very fun. A big disadvantage is that many marketing cooperatives demand a steady supply of milk throughout the year, and seasonal milking does not lend itself to that.
Hybrid systems also exist, in which most of the nutrition comes from pasture during the green season but from traditional stored feeds during the off-season. This has the disadvantage of requiring both the infrastructure required for grazing and the infrastructure required for confinement, but it may be an important means of transition if the infrastructure for confinement is already in place.
Developing a forage chain, or seasonal sequence of vegetative forage, is important for pasture-based dairy. Forage quality is of utmost importance, and it is essential that the forage be vegetative and high quality for as long a period as possible. No single forage species can maintain high quality throughout the growing season in most areas, so a sequence of forages will be helpful in many cases. Since forage quality may fluctuate throughout the season, frequent monitoring of forage quality and adjustment of supplementation may be helpful. The following is a sample forage chain sequence that may be suited to the central part of the United States.
Primary choice: a blend of winter annual cereals, annual ryegrass, and winter legumes.
Primary choice: a blend of cool-season perennial grasses (meadow brome, orchardgrass, endophyte-free or friendly-endophyte tall fescue, matua brome, or bluegrass) with legumes (alfalfa, red clover, ladino clover, bird’s-foot trefoil, sainfoin) and forbs (chicory, burnet, and plantain). Do not use endophyte-infected tall fescue for dairy pasture.
Secondary choice: winter annual pastures.
Primary choice: warm-season native pastures, preferably with the full natural component of wildflowers and native legumes. If these are missing due to past herbicide applications, it may be desirable to interseed small amounts of alfalfa and sweetclover to add protein and diversity. If native pastures are not available in your area, seed a native grass or Eastern gamagrass pasture. Subtropical grasses such as bermudagrass are acceptable but are inferior to the native warm-season grasses.
Secondary choice: cool-season grass-legume blend as described above.
Primary choice: a blend of summer annual grasses (brown midrib grazing corn, brown midrib dwarf sorghum-sudangrass, brown midrib pearl millet, Japanese millet, teff), plus summer annual legumes (cowpeas, forage soybeans, sunn hemp, guar) and warm-season forbs such as okra and sunflower.
Secondary choice: warm-season perennial grasses.
Tertiary choice: cool-season perennial grasses and legumes.
Primary choice: cool-season perennial grass/legume/forb mixtures.
Secondary choice: cool-season annual cover crop mixtures such as oats, brassicas, and spring peas. Be cautious of too many brassicas, since they can cause off-flavors in milk. Pasja hybrid brassica does not cause this.
Primary choice: winter annuals, such as cereal grains, in areas in which they do not go dormant.
Secondary choice: stockpiled endophyte-free or novel endophyte fescue, if you are in an area in which winter annuals go dormant in winter. This is usually not a good choice for lactating cows unless well supplemented; however, it can be a very good feed for dry cows in a seasonal system.