Land use for rearing beef.

[grassfarmer]

Following on from a comment Kato made on the summer calving thread. How well thought out are our land use policies relating to beef production?
I know many people in this area who grow feed at home and send cows away to expensive rented pasture. Most have a full line of machinery to produce hay, silage and seed a grain crop but don't generally run huge numbers of cows.
To me that is a strange policy as it gives rise to nutrient loss problems both through harvesting with machinery instead of cows and through having your cows deposit all their manure on someone elses land in summer. In addition you are trying to outsmart nature by using expensive machinery to harvest the product that a cow would harvest for nothing - why bother? Given the low commodity prices on the prairies wouldn't it make more sense to buy in grain byproducts to feed cows in winter. There will always be crops that need to be salvaged for feed in this climate, straw for ever more and poorer quality grain.
The thread on summer calving indicated that these later calving cows can be wintered on lower quality feed - cereal straw is a good cow feed if balanced with a source of protein and energy.
As a final thought on this topic I wonder how many producers are put off starting to manage their grass like a crop because their current pastures produce so little. When their focus is on having enough winter feed - seeding the crop, making the hay, baling the straw there is little time for managing the pasture. The cows get stuck on the areas too rough or wet to crop and have somewhere to stand from June through to October where they are usually shorter of feed than they were in mid winter. Imagine instead turning your best acres into managed intensive pasture - it would easily carry twice the stock a "cow managed" pasture produces. Instead of sending half the cows away to pasture for the summer you could keep them all at home, reap the benefits of better management in land improvement and calf gains. Extended season grazing really shortens the winter and lowers your feed costs.
Just my view of beef systems on the prairies.

[nw9flynn]

do you mean land use policies as in government and municipal land use policies or individual operators land utilization ?

[grassfarmer]

I mean individual operators use, Emrald.

[Horse]

Grassfarmer I think that is how we got into this oversuply problem that we are now trying to figure a way out of Everyone with a few cows decided to get more and make silage or buy calves and turn all thier grain into beef as grain was low and iron expensive and while all the expansion was going on all was well but all good things have to come to an end.
Why do people think they can just change the enviroment to suit themselves. For example why do they buy expensive grain land and decide to run cows on it or why buy poor broken rocky land and try to grow grain then whine when it wont work finanicaly.
Now the ones with lots of land and money can do whatever pleases them because the botom line dont matter anyway but most will bitch and whine along withthe more responsible ones. Thats the way I see it anyway.

[farmers_son]

Interesting thoughts, grassfarmer. Regarding farmers land use decisions I would say that we will see cows on the least productive land. More productive land would tend to grow crops, be it hay or grain. The days of cows being so profitable that they can displace the growing of alternative crops on the more productive land are over. We have been through a brief period of adjustment when the Crow Rate Benefit was canceled that coupled with a corresponding drop in the Canadian dollars saw a shift away from grain production to livestock production The long term costs associated with BSE along with shifts in policy regarding the importation of U.S. feeders will see a shift away from cow production back to growing more grains as the contribution per cow is cut in half or more.

I think the comments on owning a line of machinery tend to confuse the land use issue. Machinery ownership is a management decision as the choices are to own, lease or go custom. Hopefully the producers you are looking at have considered the costs and benefits of growing and harvesting their crops.

You say imagine seeing cows on intensively managed pasture. I agree that the definition of pasture is all too often just unproductive hay. But assuming the land you are thinking of could be used for some other purpose, growing grain or hay for export whether for the timothy market or for export to the U.S., I think you need to be imaging the land being used for that purpose which will be more profitable than raising cows.

Bottom line, cows are going to a lot less profitable in the coming years. Factor in the costs of BSE controls which all get passed down to the cow calf sector, the increasing value of the Canadian dollar and the changing situation with imports of competing feeders and raising cows is not going to the same as it was in the past 15 years.

Gone are the days when the successful cattleman could increase his profitability by intensive managing his/her operation to increase the size of the cow herd on a given land base. That is not to say there is not a future in the cow business but I think the direction the industry will be forced to move towards is not finding ways to keep more cows by managing grass more intensively but to keep the calves longer and longer, right through to finish thereby capturing the maximum value per calf raised. And my view of the future is that in order to be a financially viable operation it will be necessary to maintain ownership of the carcass and add value to the beef product.

More intensive, yes, but maybe in a different way than was the norm before BSE.

[feathersrun]

Isn't it the Canadian way of life to bitch and whine? But this is a very good question, why do we try to circumvent the natural order of things? I know that dh and I only run as many head as we can afford to feed for the winter, but if we can get the back field producing a decent hay crop we'll look at overwintering more head.
Monika

[grassfarmer]

farmers_son, I'm interested to see your predictions for a post BSE agriculture - not many people venture to speculate on such things. I think many are still waiting to see if things go back to "normal".
Your prediction of lower returns from beef cows may very well be true - but that was the whole point of my thread - to try and get people to think how their businesses are set up. For the survivors in the beef industry I think it is imperative that they look for lower cost systems to survive. When you dismiss the importance of managing grass intensively to raise profitabilty I think you are very wrong - in my mind only through such methods will we stay ahead of growing imports of South American meat etc. Reality is we have got to compete on the world stage if we are going to be a big exporting country again.
I agree that retaining ownership and trying to extract premiums for these cattle though owning them further down the production chain might help.
I can't see a move to grain crops being more profitable - grain in W. Canada with a smaller cattle population would be even poorer than it is now. Who can make money now growing grain? After the droughts of 02 and 03 and frosts of 04 it doesn't look too rosy to me. Add in the fact that it's profitability is substantially more vunerable to the transnational corporations than beef - through banks, machinery, fertiliser, seed, fuel, sprays - grain is a sector that would give me sleepless nights.

[farmers_son]

I was thinking about your post some more and agree that many operations have room to cut costs. The benefit from intensively managing grass will depend upon the profitability per cow when compared to what else that good land could have producing. Profitability can be increased by reducing costs as you suggest or by increasing returns which is what I was looking at. I note your comments re manure on the land. I have been thinking along the same lines in a feedlot situation and see possibilities there for the feedlot sector to cut costs by having less confinement. I recall discussions in these threads pre May 20 where cow calf producers claimed costs of $700 per head. If my view of the industry in regards to lower returns per cow are correct then both cost cutting and seeking higher returns per cow will be required to stay afloat for those producers.

I would say that intensive management of pasture would work best when cow profits are high. Will it work if cow profits are down? I think it might depend upon whether the intensive part is purchased variable cash inputs like chemical fertilizer or making the most of fixed labour costs. In the end it will boil down to cash cost per unit of production and whether that cost is lower on intensively managed good land or non intensively managed marginal land. For certain good land has to be productive whether producing grain or cows.

The move to grain and away from cattle on the more productive land will not happen because grain is more profitable, it will happen because cattle will be less profitable.

[feathersrun]

Add into this thread the eastern(Ontario)dynamic of having most of the arable farm land sold to developers on an ongoing basis. Urbanites DO NOT want to know where the food originates, nor do they want to deal with the waste products from the food (if you get my drift). It is far more profitable to lose money for several years and then sell to some developer, than it is to manage the farm properly and make a profit here.
Dh and I are not is this position BTW, I am going for a job interview today because his FT off the farm job is not paying enough!
Monika

[greybeard]

Sometimes we assume to much. I am reminded of a few years back when the grasser market was realy hot, I asked an old mennenite freind of mine how anyone was going to make any money buying grass cattle for $900. He said it was never better. They were contracted out for $1100. If you can run 150 on a quarter, that beats the heck out of grain.Unload them in the spring and load them up in the fall. Never start an engine to start burning money.

[cakadu]

I believe that the other side of this is preserving the natural capital that we have and this has to be considered when making planning decisions.

I don't know how well the export timothy market has been doing in the past few years, but it would be subject to a great many factors that affect the rest of farming i.e. drought, frost this fall, poor quality that cannot be put into the export market etc.

Less input costs and not being over capitalized and managing grass better would be one way to increase money in producer pockets.

Grass and permanent cover provide vital conservation and biodiversity functions which should not be overlooked. With changing climate patterns this is something that we have to take into consideration for future sustainability. Even though we have had moisture here in Central Alberta, we are still a long way from having water bodies recharged. The surface water is an indication of what is happening below ground and if there are ponds, sloughs and lakes around you that don't have their normal amount of water, that is a tell-tale sign.

I am having a hard time understanding why folks thing of growing grass is for marginal land only.

[Horse]

How much grass can you grow in a dry yr I would sugest a hell of a lot less than cereal crops on a per ton per acre basis I know I can feed more animals per acre on cereal than on grass.
As for grass on marginal land try seeding into steap hills or in bottom land that is wet late or 10or 20 acre eregular fields and you will soon learn why grass. Not all land is created eaqual.And I sure cant see making payments off cows on 2500to 2800$ per acre land but I cant see grain doing much better , but I can see some one farming 3000 acres but I cant see someONE running 800 cows alone.

[cakadu]

Horse, I think that marginal land should be turned into permanent perennial cover for a number of conservation reasons, not to mention that it isn't cost effective to try and grow annual cereal crops in it.

I just don't know why it is that people think that grass can ONLY be grown on marginal land. I would daresay that the 3000 acres scenario would be pretty tough for only 2 or 3 people to plant and harvest. There is a point of diminishing returns and efficiencies in economies of scale also start to go downward at a certain point.

This is where I believe that we have to start thinking outside of the box and quit thinking we can't do it and start believing we can. It is change and like anything else, change is hard at first and with time it gets a little easier.

[countryguy]

I guess to sum up this topic if you are not returning the manure to your own land and not making the most efficient use of your own grass,and harvesting it as cheap as possible you're not making as much money as you possibly can from your operation.Correct Grassfarmer?

[cswilson]

The best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket-from what i've seen on the average ranchers are better at folding than farmers.