How do you feed your cows?

[3words]

To my way of thinking, we get more "mileage" out of the hay by rolling it out. It seems to take less pounds of long-stemmed rolled out hay to fill up a cow than by using processed hay

I have found that too. They did a study in Lacombe and decided rolling hay out wasted less than a bale processor unless you put it in a trough. I use a hydra bed also after grazing stock piled grass. If I had troughs set up I would like to feed my calves with the processor though.

That makes sense, as part of the "advantage"of a processor is that it reduces particle length and increases intake. For example a cow might then be able to go from 2.5 to 3% of her bodyweight in intake. With poor feed that might mean enough extra nutrients to make do. With good feed, it seems to me to be a pretty expensive proposition. It was interesting, today Dad was talking to a neighbour who feeds the same number of cows as us (no calves though) and spends as much time per day with a tractor and processor as we do per week using electric fence. He's happy and so are we, so I guess we both know what we are doing, and the other guy is definitely crazy.

I tried bale grazing last year until calving season almost started to give it a fair try.For the amount of feed that is just wasted by the cows not eatting the coarse alfalfa,and the hay the cows lay on and crap on.I can feed less bales a day with the processor,and the amount of money lost by the cows not cleaning up the bales bale grazing i can easily pay for the fuel for the tractor,and still have money leftover.Time saved doesn't mean more money in the pocket for me.

 

[Faster horses]

On the last processor we bought, we had a scale put on it so we would know
just what we were feeding. I figured that over the life of the processor all we had to do was save 50 ton of hay at $50/ton. It did that easy the first year. And when we bought some hay that was supposed to be 1300# bales,
when we fed some in the processor, they only weighed a bit over 1000#. After a few days of the same thing, Mr. FH loaded a trailer load of it and took it to town to be weighed. Yes, the average was around 1050#. So we called the seller and got an adjustment on the hay weight. It paid for itself right there.

One thing about it, with the scale you know exactly what you are feeding, no guesswork. Amazing how much difference there is between stacks.

 

[gcreekrch]

Get enough of repairing iron in the summer, simple is good enough for us. :wink:

What these ol' cows don't know won't hurt them. Besides, chewing is another way for them to keep warm.

Had a good visit with a rancher from Sask. last winter at Creech's bull sale. He had gone back to rolling bales out instead of processing them for 900 cows. Kept track of fuel costs and they were exactly half of running the tractors at PTO speed.

 

[flyingS]

The one thing that will not change is that 30lbs of hay is still 30lbs of hay no matter how you feed it. The same 30lbs, be it fed in a ring, out of a processor or unrolled has the same value. I would say the difference is in the ability to utilize poor quality forage and fuel and time savings. You also have to keep in mind what you are using to feed that hay with, a hydrabed compared to tractor or tractor compared to a tractor. The other thing that needs to be thought out when processing hay is the kind of power you have. I have a close friend that runs a 7 bale highline with a 185 horse tractor, is it over kill, sure but he doesn't burn much fuel that tractor never labors to run that processor and he bought a low hour obsolete farm tractor. I know he doesn't have 12,000 in the whole outfit. I also have a friend that runs a dewyre 6 bale slicer, it is hydraulicly driven so it doesn't take much horse to run it, he just idles around and feeds. Feeding that way he gets a lot of hours out of a tank of fuel. If you cover a lot of miles getting from herd to herd, you can probably justify a bale bed in time savings very easily. There are several ways to skin a cat, you just have to learn not to be open minded enough to realize that you may not know the best way.

 

[BRG]

Question for BRG, have you ever put the pencil to your two different herds and figured the difference in feed costs? When feed is cheaper I would guess it is more profitable to have older and bigger calves. But with high priced feed I'm pretty sure the May June herd is more profitable. I think there was an article in Working Ranch mag recently to that effect. Not having to feed a lactating cow saves an incredible amount of feed.

Ya I have, but it would be different for every situation. For example, all our cows are for seed stock use. So we hold the May/June calves over and make 2's out of the bulls. They are more expensive to feed from start to finish once weaned because we have them longer and this time of year them 1300 lbs bulls know how to eat!!! But the last couple years they sell better than yearling bulls (last spring about $1000/head more) and we have a higher live calving % on their dams. So I would say we make more off them than the spring bulls. BUT know one wants a June replacement heifer or bred cow, so we make more $ off the spring calving cows that we sell replacement heifers off of.

Now if they were all commercial and you compared apples to apples, I would say that with labor, feed costs, machinery expense, the May/June calvers would be the most profitable. As they calve with hardly any labor at all, you rarely loose a calf, and the winter costs on them for us are under $1/day until we start feeding protein, and then that ads about $.25/a day to them which is still affordable. We only see them about once a week over the winter, basically to make us feel better. Now when you sell calves they will sell for less money than February calves since they are lighter, but I know we would have more to sell as I stated earlier we have a higher calving % of live calves off the May/June calvers.

Their are a couple down sides to it, first you will have a higher % of open cows as you are breeding in the hottest months of the year, and the other is most of our customers are selling replacement heifers off the cow in the fall weighing in that 5 to 550 lbs area in Oct. You could still do that, but it is harder to get heifers weighing that as younger calves, so most guys would end up selling them as feeder heifer price, which is about $20/cwt under the replacements in our area. So what we have been doing is every spring we pick off around 60 or so cows that don't quite fit our seed stock program, but are still pretty good cows and breed them a little earlier and sell April/May bred cows and keep more heifers back. That seems to be working quite well for us.

So if I was a commercial rancher, I would probably calve around April 20, which is a little earlier than ours, but you would have a little heavier calf in the fall, but still be able to take advantage of the cheaper winter costs and less labor as I think that would be about ideal financially and for labor reasons.

 

[George]

On my north farm ( I know 4 letter word ) I have a bunch of stock piled grass and the cows will only get fed hay if the snow becomes a problem.

This is the last Charolis and she is the meanest cow I have ever kept- - - I find myself wishing for her to be open when we preg check.

On the south farm my son is running cattle with his father-in-law and they take a different tact. Feed as much as 6 months of the year.

We put up silage in a large bag and feed about noon everyday - - - we also put a round bale out about every third day ( as eaten )

As you can see we have mud there already - - - as soon as the skid steer shows up the cows come.

Three years ago my Grand Daughter wanted a "Red Cow" this is "Ruby" she was shown in 4H and is very gentle. Her calves have been kind of common.

My son rents a bunch of ground he bales so he hauls feed home - - - I have only got 18 head now and as such don't have to bring in feed. I used to bale like him and kept 3 times as many cattle and worked much harder. At this time in my life my method works.