Do we raise grass or beef (livestock)

[cakadu]

I've been wanting to pose this question for some time now and feel it might be time for some good discussion on this particular topic.

Most livestock producers know how to calculate their winter feed needs /- 10 to 20% depending on the year and the weather. The calculator keys get a work out when we calculate our forage/straw needs.

Do we know how to do the same with our grass - or should we be doing that?

Cowman, you said in another post that your son is thinking about getting into swath grazing - by the way I agree that at -32 I can live without having to go and do the feeding.

There are many studies that show the economic and environmental benefits to grazing management. Rotational grazing, long enough rest periods between grazing intervals, intensive grazing make better use of the forages and are much better for environmental sustainability.

Maybe the time has finally come for people to start taking a long hard look at stocking and carrying capacity versus this is how much pasture I have, I can run all my cows on it. What is the best way to share this information with people and get them interested in at least hearing about the benefits of grazing management and extended grazing?

[ALICIA]

When are you going to find the time to do the labour that is involved with intence grazing and rotating the cattle, with your out side job that we are all going to have to have, because the money is going to run out if we don't start getting a price for our cattle.

[paladin]

Cakadu – a topic dear to my heart You are absolutely correct – many of us need to be a wee bit handier with the calculator when considering grass. The benefits are definitely there in better grass management – and for many of us who’ve come to managing grass via the plow – there is a lot to learn. Like Alicia says money and time are obviously a huge factor and the next few months will tell most of us whether we continue with the on-farm innovations or not. Our operation started seriously using swath-grazing and better rotations incorporating longer rest periods on the pastures about 4 years ago. Now we are a long way from being any demonstration site, but I do believe that the health of the grass on most of our place is much better after 3 solid years of drought & 1 of hoppers than it would have been if we had continued status quo. We are seeing marked improvements in litter accumulations and yields in some areas are better than we’ve seen in a long, long time. We were actually able to cut hay this past year on what had been two of our more beat-up tame pastures just a few years ago – neither of these fields have seen a haybine in more than a dozen years. Now I know that the moisture we received late last spring in much of Alberta was mighty helpful – but if the grass wasn’t reasonably healthy there was no way we would have been wading through waist-high alfalfa-brome on these aging (15 yrs) pastures and definitely not the way we had been previously managing.

Personally, after many years of seminars and workshops - the absolute best experience we’ve ever had was to attend the annual Pasture School put on by Western Forage Beef Group out of Lacombe – opens your mind to a whole different way of looking at grass.

[cowman]

Well I don't want to rip all this new grazing science but I do believe it is much more important to just be out there and know your grass. I believe a good walk everyday or so will let you know pretty well what is happening. The problem with all these formulas is they don't really tell the whole story. In the 2002 drought all the formulas in the world wouldn't have really worked...we just had to be real hard on the grass! Now we could have sold all the cows but in the real world that doesn't work.
There is more to this old game than just what is good for the grass! It definitely can be a tricky balancing act? And sometimes you have to abuse it a bit so you can survive! And grassland can take a couple of hard years every now and then, as long as we don't continue to abuse it.
I still believe grass benifits most when you spend some time with it! Just like cows! You know: The eye of the farmer fattens the cow kind of thing?

[cakadu]

Cowman, grazing management is a large part of what you speak - knowing your pastures and watching them for things like regrowth, species selection and such.

It isn't necessarily about formulas per se, but being aware of what the land is trying to tell you. A rest period is not the time between when the snow falls and when the first shoots show up in the spring.

While the past couple of years have pretty much forced producers to turn the cows out as soon as is possible, that is not necessarily the best thing to do for the grass unless there is enough of a residual there.

For some of you that have been doing grazing management, what are some of the practices that you employ?

Yes, it can get pretty intensive depending on stocking rates etc. - I know people who were moving 300 pairs on a daily if not twice daily because they were letting them graze an acre at a time. They had 2 sections of land and they could rotate their cows through every 90 to 120 days and you could literally see the grass growing behind. They also had plenty of feed left for the cows at the end of the summer of 2002.

The better the grass the better both the cow and her calf do. Poor pastures can become good producing grass stands once again. It takes time and care, but it is really worth it. Not easy - especially with the last couple of years - but it can be done.

[grassfarmer]

Cakadu, I consider myself to be in the FORAGE business rather than the CATTLE business. I aim to manage the natural resources of soil, water and solar power to produce the maximum volume of plant material. Beef cattle are the tools I use to convert that plant material into a saleable product (beef).
To a newcomer from overseas, Canadian beef producers biggest weakness looks to me to be their grass management. Too many operations I see seem content to feed cattle 8 months of the year with a shiny new Case tractor ($120,000?) and then complain how it's impossible to make money in cattle. I don't know if feed prices were low enough to make this type of policy pay in the recent past but they haven't been in the last three years.
I feel "management intensive grazing" is the way ahead regardless of droughts or market disruption as it has been shown over and over again to be the most profitable and sustainable way to farm.

[topper]

I know I am sure happy I didn't listen to the grazing guru's this year as we got a lot of freezing rain in November and our ground is covered with about a two inch sheet of ice. Now if I would have went to swath grazing like everybody seems to be recommending to do what would I be feeding my cattle this winter.The cows could never break through to the swath. Most cattlemen in my area at least, feed hay for the simple reason that it works. Don't get me wrong I am not against alternative feeding methods if they work for someone but no one rule works for all. A few years like this one and a swath grazers profits might not look so good either. I think I would rather ride that tractor than go out with the half ton and axe and chop out enough feed for the day.

[kato]

We grew some corn this year to swath graze. The drought got it, and it was a little short, so we didn't even swath it. We just opened the gate and let the cows in. I have never seen happier cows in my life! They had such a party out there, it was a joy to watch.

They ate every bit of corn, also, even went out after it snowed and pulled stalks up from the ground when they had hay bales in the yard. We had been afraid they would walk on it, and not eat it all, but that wasn't the case at all.

We have ordered next year's corn already. This time we're trying one with better drought tolerance.

[countryguy]

No doubt about it we are grass farmers and the drought proved it.No grass,no cattle,and no game to play.

I do some rotational grazing,not too intense yet but aprox weekly moves.This summer being as dry as it was this method really shone.I had neighbors feeding in later July while I grazed through to mid November using a field of grass I saved for fall.The neighbors commented on how well the pasture was doing in such a dry year.

Rotational grazing is not hard to do and takes very little extra time.The cows practically do it themselves after they get to know the routine.

One thing to consider is that if one would spend a little more time out in the field increasing the farms productivity they make not have to work off farm.

[cakadu]

Rotational grazing is one more tool that we can use as a means of feeding those walking biological digesters aka cows (sheep, buffalo what have you) that take the grass and turn it into something more usable by humans.

From what I understand of it - it is not meant to replace the traditional feeding methods, but rather used to enhance what we are already doing. Topper - the cows may not have been able to get at it this year, but it would have been available to them in the spring and that might have been the pasture that they started out with.

It seems to me that even the best at swath grazing and extended grazing still have to feed at some stage - they just delay it. Let's face it, in most of this country the weather gets too bad at some stage and the animals can only paw down so far before it becomes too much of a hardship for them. (Incidentally, this is what livestock had to do many years ago before we got all these fancy handling systems).

Letting the cows go and get the feed is certainly a lot easier than mowing, baling, picking up, stacking and storing and then feeding it.

The system can be as intense or as manageable as you want to make it, that's the beauty of it. What one is doing is giving the grass time to come back before it is chewed down again.

I guess what I'm trying to find out is what would you need in order to change your attitude towards grazing management? Would it be having local people demonstrate how it works and why it works?

Over the years, I've come to realize that before any change can take place, there must be a shift in attitude and then the skills required seem to follow. What do we need to do in order to shift attitudes? Is it as simple/complex as understanding that we are growing grass which allows us to raise livestock?