Anyone on here want to comment on feeding grain

[grassfarmer]

Not that its any of your business but we are running
50% more cows than you and we are backgrounding
all our calves as usual.
The last 80 cows just went onto full feed on Friday as
the snow turned to concrete on us and ended the
grazing season. So likely under 90 days winter
feeding on them.

[ASRG]

grassfarmer: How did your cows make out this winter grazing? This was a pretty tough year....did they lose more condition than say last year?
From previous posts, you said you feed silage? How many pounds/cow/day from here on in....how much does it cost per cow/day? How much straw?

[grassfarmer]

ASRG, the cows did really well actually because the
grass quality is the best we have ever had. It is still
really green under there as a result of it keeping on
growing later than usual. It was cold before Christmas
but snow conditions were fine. The last week or so
were challenging as it was getting up to my knees
then with the thaw it got hard pretty quick.

I have some pictures and a video I'd post if this site
wasn't set up by the Flintstones - Kato care to explain
the posting photo/video deal again?

We'll push the silage to them now as they are in their
3rd trimester. I always have straw available and that
lets me control how much silage I'm feeding. I'll
probably aim for 5lbs consumption of straw/day on
the heifers/young cows and 8-10lbs on the mature
cows as the silage is lower protein than usual.
Including yardage I figure $1.60/day to feed silage
but with the daily feeding/moveable
feedbunks/windbreaks this system uses that allows
us to cover quite a lot of ground in terms of land
improvement.

[smcgrath76]

AF - Based on your limited information
and guessing your cows at 1500 pounds,
the grain ration of 12 pounds of peas
and 8 pounds of barley would already
meet the protein requirements of the
cows, but would fall about 10 MCAL short
on energy (that is a bit of a guess
without feed tests). You would also
need a high calcium mineral although
your phos would be OK. Knowing the
roughage available would change things
dramatically and could knock the grain
requirement back a bunch and balance out
the calhos ratio quite a bit.

[ASRG]

For what it's worth, from the "Alberta Beef Herd Management Guide":

For a 1100 lb mature pregnant cow/mid winter

16.5 lb (7.5kg) barley or oat straw
3.3 lb (1.5kg) barley
1.1 lb (.5kg) of 32% beef supplement

All based on avg. nutrition values. Mineral and vitamin supplementation might be required.
They list barley straw at:
.93 mcal/lb 4.6% protein

They list barley:
1.7 mcal/lb 12.1 protein

[kato]

I only know how to embed Youtube videos. I wish I knew how to post pictures. I could post one of our cows out grazing corn. They've been out there since mid October now, and are going to have trouble finishing it before calving starts in two weeks.

Minus 40 with the windchill today, and it's the first time they've shown any reluctance to walk the half mile to the corn. I don't blame them! I wouldn't do it either.

For you guys who are having issues with hay.. have you ever investigated grazing corn? It's sure a lot cheaper than paying 160 for a bale of hay. If hay ever got that expensive here, there's no way we would buy it.

We're going to end up with cows in the yard feeding from Feb 1 to about April 15, which comes to 73 days, if my math is correct. Not bad for Manitoba. Basically they're only in the yard to calve, and then they're back out.

[ASRG]

kato: could you give us a quick run down on the costs of grazing corn.....from a first hand farmer experience?
One other thing.....you probably get more heat units than us guys out here in the "artic"....how developed does the cob get?

[kato]

We did the math the other day.. again. It worked out to less than 70 cents a day per cow. That wasn't using any machinery depreciation or anything. All the equipment cost is a day of seeding and then a day of knocking down strips for the electric fence. We get it custom sprayed, so that's calculated in. You also save a lot of fuel while they're out grazing, which isn't included in that calculation.

When you've been grazing a field for a while, you find that your fertilizer costs go down. We don't use anywhere near the fertilizer that a grain farmer would. It gets 50 actual pounds of nitrogen, and some manure, sometimes, depending on whether they've got some grazed when we clean corrals. Yield goes from a low of 9 tonnes per acre, to a top end of about 16 tonnes. That's according to the samples that crop insurance has taken over the years. Even on the poorer yield years, there's been lots for the cows to eat.

We sow in May, and turn the cows out usually in mid October. We've always had cobs. They average between 8 and 10 inches long, for our variety. One year we got an early frost, and it froze while it was still green, but the cobs were filled. What happened was the sugar in the plant got trapped in the stem and the cows just loved it. As long as the cobs are filled, and fairly ripe, we don't worry about it too much.

[grassfarmer]

Yeah, ASRG I don't think they have developed a corn
yet that is economic on the sub 1600 heat units my
place usually gets.
So is that conventional corn kato as opposed to
RR/BT stuff?
Kato's comment about getting an early frost trapping
the sugar in the stem is exactly what we get in
September on tame grasses like meadow brome. This
is our biggest natural advantage - to have the ability
to grow the quality of forage to fatten cattle or milk
dairy cows on that late in the year. I'm in grass
country not corn country.

[smcgrath76]

We've tried corn but can pencil the
costs out to anything near Kato's
figuring. Also, since we are not set up
for farming at all, it turned out to be
a huge PITA from a management
perspective. The crop insurance on our
corn, was more than the cost of seeding
our swath grazing and we didn't get any
more days out of it.
We have neighbours that love it and use
it as their sole feed source and we may
look at it again in the future, but for
now it is on my too risky and too
expensive list.

AF - the numbers I ran came out of
Cowbytes 5. If you give the AB Ag
number a call they will probably walk
you through a ration, or if you post
some more info about what you have to
feed, there are likely several folks on
here who could run a quick scenario.

GF - I agree with you on the grass
grazing. Most folks never find out how
much a cow can do on her own.