Hay

[farmers_son]

One of our neighbours who is calving now is finding his hay is not good enough to maintain his cows with a sucking calf. Prior to calving the cows looked full but once they calved they looked shelly and they lost condition fast even though they were getting all the hay they could eat. Now he is looking for better hay even though he has lots of bales in the stack yard. And apparently there is not much good quality hay out there.

Is anyone else finding this? And what are people paying for hay and is there any decent hay out there or is it all poor quality even if it looks alright.

[smcgrath76]

Get a feed test!!!
There is a lot of good looking but poorer
quality hay out there. Some of the higher
quality stuff is pricey because of it.
I have seen good feed with a test running
from 4-5c per pound.
Take a look at the Ab Ag hay site.
There may actually be better rations made
with some of the straw/chaff and pellet
combinations available this year.

[wd40]

Might be alot more effdective to feed a couple lbs barley with a strong protein supp. Protein helps the gut make use of poorer (low in digestable protein) quality roughage, and energy will put the milk back into the udder.

As far a feed samples are concerned. The four legged critters have done the feed sample and do a much better job than the lab can do.

The lab can't tell you the digestable protein nor the available energy of poor feeds.

It make take considerable more dry matter from good hay to lift the ration to where it needs to be for a calving cow, looking to repair the birth cannal and feed a baby. The breeding season will be affected if the ration dosn't get lifted now. Now is the most critical time of the cows life but you know that.

[wd40]

PS - sounds like full bellies are indicating high dry matter consumption in an attempt to get enough real feed quality components. Cows will starve on full bellies, with poor low in digestable feed stuffs.

[grassfarmer]

I was looking to buy some hay to stretch our silage but it isn't penciling at the moment. I need to be able to land 8% protein, 58% TDN here for under $75 a ton or I can produce the same with straw and pellets cheaper. The biggest problem is hay quality - most is little different to the good oat straw we can buy for 1.5c/lb in the yard. The other problem is distance and trucking - there seems to be a lot of hay in eastern Alberta this year which is too far to haul to where I am cost effectively.
I think one thing is clear - with the quantities on offer and the reduced herd size it should be a buyers market but most of the sellers are still thinking they are in 2009 where it was a sellers market. I think there will be many thousands of bales available at severely reduced prices come June. I guess for sellers it just depends where you are located relative to the buyers.

PS.I think your hay is priced right f_s, you are just too far away ;O)

[ALLFARMER]

We are having some problems with poor feed quality here also. I have put my old herd back onto running water no more snow only. The vet who I actually was able to talk into comming out to take a blood sample agreed they should not be on just snow. We have also cut out the pea straw completely in our rations. I am figuring the mineral we use is to low in Magnesium 0.4% UFA mineral is 5% so we are switching. 2 animals that I thought looked ok went down. Thankfully the weather is turning warmer. I also notice Ole Farms at Athabasca -1800 cows- calves in May our old herd is not due till April 6 and I am pretty sure we will push that back to May also

[kato]

Down cows. That jumped off the page.

That's something we've had to deal with since we've been grazing corn. If you have a cow that doesn't go to the mineral feeder, and there are some that are like that, they can become unbalanced and suddenly you have a big fat healthy cow just go down. In the corn's case, it's calcium that we're blaming. We switched to 3:1 mineral, which helped a lot. We also found that if we treat them right away as though they had milk fever, they respond just as quickly as a milk fever cow. We give them a couple of bottles of Cal-Phos, or something like that and it's amazing. We usually get one cow a year that does this. We haven't lost one. They have all responded.

I wonder if this may work on a cow with a magnesium deficiency too? There is magnesium in these solutions too. Might be worth a try.

SADIE, what do you think?

[ALLFARMER]

The stuff I am using is Cal/Mag/Phos 500ml

I think we are going to buy all are mineral in one shot instead of picking up a few bags here and there every time we run out. I was told 1/2 bag/cow should be used per winter.

Hopefully the blood test we are sending away will shed some light.

[SADIE]

Kato---I practiced in a complete dairy practice in Prince Edward Island and we treated for CAL PHOS ---the true milk fever (Calcium Phos deficency).---That was back in 1976.

Beef Practice---east central Alberta and now running my own beef cows you see the same downer cow condition. That becomes Magnesium Defeciency, Grass tetany, or hypo-magnesium. Seen this many times over the years in the Beef Cow herd. Kept cases of Cal--Magnisium available at all times. Still keep a case on hand at our ranch. A small tip when treating Hypo-Magnesium in a beef cow. Put the first 500ml bottle or two under the skin when the animal is down first, or in the abdomen area (rt side) standing behind the cow (opposite the rumen) first before you put any (Magnisium 500mls) in the jugular vein. This way when the jug is half empty (in vein) those animals that get up and "take off" have slower acting soln (under skin or intra abdominal) so they can stay up and not relapse on you.

This fall at weaning I tried a new product of ALL TRACE bolus to calves at weaning (1 bolus/300lbs--max 2 boluses) in the calves. They recommend 2 boluses/adult cow---8 month release of trace minerals. "Heaven forbit I do not want to handle the adult bovine head again----applying tags causes enough swinging".

Feedback to Alltrace company was to perfect a smaller bolus for calves going to grass to give at spring branding (while on cradle). I believe there is some value in this product but more scientific research and clinical trials will be coming forward in a year or two.

Minerals in feed---anything, anyway that works to get the product in the animals ---I too am an observer on agriville to see what is working from others "trials and tips".

[Kathy]

The couple from the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan area that lost hundreds of goats, a few years back, experienced a similar problem. The wife told me that the CFIA stopped them from bringing in a bolus mineral supplement from the UK, which supplied their goats with adequate slow release minerals like COPPER, ZINC, MAGNESIUM. They only experienced problems AFTER they could no longer access these boluses.

It shouldn't surprise anybody here that humans are, in general, magnesium deficient also. If you want to feel better, I recommend taking magnesium citrate at bedtime (not at the same time as your other vitamins/pharma pills).

Animals turn on and off genetics with what they eat (including humans). In some ways, by drastically altering diets away from what is naturally available in the grazing environment during summer, we are creating newborns with a different dietary requirement than their dams.

There is truly some benefit in baling up weeds, or weedy cereal crops for the cows, as the weeds can sometimes provide better mineral content than the hay/crop. Our fixation with clean fields and monoculture crops/feed is smoke and mirrors when it comes to balanced diets.

[greybeard]

Good quality hay in this area is also in short supply.
Part of the problem was the late start we got this year due to poor haying weather in June and early July. Most of the hay was put up over mature and lots weathered.
The late start meant no second cut to use to balance all the poor stuff.
I too am buying pellets and will be using more oat straw or grass seed residue.
Another part of the problem is all the hay fields are petering out here and at current cash crop prices are not likely to be reseeded.
Kathy,I think they call those weeds you refer to as accumulators.Some have evolved to be able to grow in soils that don't have sufficient micro nutrients to support most plants. I saw a list that categorized the ones that were best for the different nutrients but haven't been able to find it recently.

[grassfarmer]

SADIE, We tried the Alltrace bolus on the cows back in Scotland in the 80's and they were an abject failure. We had severe mineral shortages there particularly of copper which manifested itself in two ways - open cows and weak calves unwilling to suckle when they were born. We tried the bolus at fall preg-checking and by the time the calves were born in April they were weak and blood tests (on calves)showed their levels very low for the things in the bolus. It was reckoned the cows built a kind of film around the bolus which thickened and hardened preventing the contents being released. Can't say how it affected fertility in cows the following summer as we reverted to giving them loose mineral also. Horrible things to apply to cows - fighting cows heads, getting a few spat out and a few broken open with cows back teeth. Expensive, unpractical and useless in my experience.