Today marks 8 months since we've opened the silage pits. Looks like we may need to feed for another month yet. That makes 275 days of feeding. Person gets kind of "fed up" with it, at least we are. On the bright side, we still have feed for another month. On the down side, someone wanted to buy the rest of our silage yesterday but we don't dare sell any.
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What do you figure it cost to feed and bed your cows this winter? The Canadian cattleman quotes barley silage at $42.50/ton. Is this about what it sells for?
275 days works out to over 9 months! How would you like to have cows in Brazil or Australia where they never have to feed their cows? No wonder they can blow us out of the water!
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The farmer who wanted to buy the silage was paying $ 35 for barley silage and $ 42 for haylage (at the pit). When you start taking into account that straw is worth about $ 25 per bale, plus your minerals, feeding cattle becomes an expensive proposition, probably about $500 a pair if you'd go by market prices for feed. And yet... Last year with the drought, pastures and hayland were affected the worst. If a person were to run these cows in feedlot-like conditions, one would be able to support a lot more cows on the same acres, silage yield was pretty decent around here.
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Garst Bros. in Iowa used to do this on a big scale back in the late 60's. They were basically big seed corn producers and they wanted cattle to clean up the corn fields after harvest. They chopped the aftermath and put it in a pit(called it shucklage) then turned the cows into the corn fields. They ran about 2500 cows this way and other than about a month in the fields they were in a feedlot. A lot of the Simmental cattle have Garst bloodlines in their pedigrees.
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