Early weaning/ swath grazing/ etc.

[grassfarmer]

Frenchman, the grazing corn does look interesting but I wouldn't consider it.
I'm put of by that advert for the RR version where they claim you can feed your cows for 65 (?) cents a day but they will only guarantee they won't cost more that $1.20 per day or you will get your money back up to a $3000 limit. That is a total crock - they claim it to be cheap but won't stand behind it at a realistic price level. It's a hugely expensive input crop and this money all goes into Monsanto, fuel companies, fertiliser companies - all the people removing the profit from agriculture. Looks like too high risk for me - plus I live in just about the frostiest hollow in the Province which won't suit corn.

[cswilson]

Hey glad to hear you had a great sale Randy-how many bulls are coming north-do you feel like judging a 4H show when you make your trip north.I'm heading to Balzac for Ty's bullriding on 4/15 so will try and stop in then.

[smcgrath76]

This is a very useful discussion for us. I don't think corn fits in our picture at home. We have talked about it, but it is too land/$/equipment intensive for us. As well, we can generally graze well into winter (at least for the last several years). We are in NE AB, so frost free days are an issue for us as well.
Stockpiled forage is our lifeblood at home as we graze native range in the winter, but put our cows onto tame forage (crested wheat) in early spring once the growing season starts. If we graze native range too early we see a big shift away from wheatgrass/needlegrass/fescue and into blue grama. The money we would lose on forage production by doing this would sink us as we graze mostly native range.
There was some neat work done out of U of S that shows that native range will outproduce tame in the longrun with no inputs.
We are considering crested wheat and cicer milkvetch as a good combination as we can hammer the crested early on, come back and get the cicer milkvetch and recovered CW, and then stockpile the remainder.
Just some of our thinking at the moment though. We are lucky as Dad is pretty open to new ideas, and I have a little brother working on a rangelands degree.

[FRENCHMAN]

Lots of guys here growing corn...some of them have got their cost down to 35-40cents a day per head.We averaged 206 cows days per acre swath grazing oats this year.As far as moving fence its no problem..In fact its quicker then feeding round bales.One day in Febuary here I gave the cows enough feed for 3 days in 28 minutes.

[farmers_son]

Smcgrath76: Is there a link for the U of S research on native grass vs tame that you mentioned?

[smcgrath76]

I will do some digging farmers_son. The work was done by RT Coupland.
He basically stood the conventional research community on its' ear with his well documented trials.