grassfarmer?

[grassfarmer]

nicolaas, I guess it does depend where you are and the amount of precipitation you normally get. The stocking rate you quote of 6000 AUDs per quarter is only 37.5 AUDs/acre. In my area land that yields this little grass likely wouldn't grow a good silage crop either. Here with intensively managed pasture our best parts are providing over 100 AUD's per acre without fertiliser. That kind of production excites me as someday my whole place can maybe produce that or more - year after year with no fertiliser, reseeding or machinery costs. I don't know about your area but I have heard people around here say you get more production from silage than grass. They don't usually manage their grass, permanently overgraze what they have and don't use fertiliser. But on the silage land they seed with $1/2 million of machinery, put on a pile of fertiliser and harvest when they can get maximum yield. It's not really a fair comparison to say that silage always outyields the grazing in these conditions.

[kpb]

grassfarmer I agree with much of what you have written on this post. However in your last thread you mentioned seeding and silaging with half a million dollars worth of equipment. This does not have to be the case. For many years I have neither seeded nor cut nor silaged my crop--all is custom done. My costs are around $20 per ton in the pit, including seeding, fertilizer, trucking, packing, everything. The only thing I do is cover the pit.

Now if you assume I get 8 tons to the acre, that's 16,000 pounds wet and about 8,000 pounds dry. There is nobody around here that I know of that gets that sort of yield from their grass.

Also I will feed about 5 tons to each of my poor old cows over the winter so it will cost me about $100 to feed them and maybe another $10 for straw so they feel fat. That works out to 50 pounds of silage per day, roughly, and some straw. They don't get fat but they calve fine and re-breed well on the grass. That doesn't include yardage but it's still cheaper than grazing at $30 per month?? It works out to well less than $.70 per day (less than $21 per month) to feed them silage and I don't own any silaging or cultivating machinery. I know it sounds crazy but there you go.

As I said earlier I agree with most of your thoughts about grass and grazing but the numbers I've given sure make me think sometimes.

kpb

[farmers_son]

When you compare your cost of winter feeding to custom grazing you are not only ignoring the cost of yardage but the cost of the land to grow your 8 tons per acre not to mention seed and fertilizer, spray. Based on your costs of hiring custom at $20 in the pit and your yields of 8 tons per acre your custom costs just for putting up silage is a whopping $160 per acre. I have just assumed some costs for seed, land rent or use of your own land, fert and spray which suggest your total costs could be between $275 and $300 per acre. Or the cost of your silage landed in the pit is about $37 per ton or $74 per ton on a dry matter basis . Using these number your winter feed costs would approach $200 per cow. Your winter feeding costs would be about $40 per month without yardage.

I just worked out these numbers because I was interested in how costs looked in a different area.

There is page at Ropin the Web that compares various costs of wintering cows with corn but it compares cereal costs as well:

http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/newslett.nsf/all/wfbg7469

Basically anytime we can eliminate the costs of mechanical harvesting and let the cows harvest the crop themselves there is a cost benefit. It is my impression that kpb also backgrounds calves so wintering your cows with silage may involve some convenience since you are using the tractor and silage wagon anyway. But it sure looks like if you saved some acres for winter grazing for at least part of the winter you could save some of that $160 per acre custom harvesting or reduce your actual cash costs of wintering your cows by $50 per head if you swath grazed for between 2 and 3 months of the winter.

[cswilson]

Ok here's one to think about-are you better to graze later and use up your grass or to feed a bit sooner and turn out earlier in the spring. My self I'd tend to start a bit earlier in the fall-my cows in early spring will graze anything with relish-especially the pastures we fed on a year previous-the winter seems to make that heavily manured grass a bit more palatable. Also when we wean early @120 days you can winter those old cows pretty thrifty. Our native grasses don't cure on the stem really well-I have one pretty good bluegrass meadow that would make nice spring pasture.

[smcgrath76]

Interesting topic. How many of us would cut our hay crop when it is only 3 inches high or less, then come back in two weeks and harvest it again? Not likely, but that is how a lot of grass is managed under continuous grazing systems. In our area that means 25 cows on a quarter for 5 months. As nearly as I can determine, with no management that quarter should really have no more than 15 AU's on it. I am not sure that comparing a harvesting situation with a continuous grazing system is really a fair comparison.
We have done quite a bit of math at home and we can run cows on grass cheaper than we can feed them, particularly if we don't want to work for free.
CSW - I would pick grazing later into the winter and a later turnout, but only because we have less crested wheat than native forage in our situation, and by letting our fesuces/wheatgrasses/speargrasses get a better start we can produce more than double the forage/nutrients of a continuous/early grazed pasture that in our area shifts to a blue grama/junegrass mix.

[grassfarmer]

Farmers_son, I think you missread kpb's post - he stated the $20 a ton was for silage in the pit including seeding and fertiliser. As you say though it does not include a land use cost. As a price per area comparison I am paying $25 a ton just now to buy silage cut, hauled and packed which I think is a great buy as we will mix it further with straw in winter to cheapen the cost. I agree kpb it's great to let someone else own the metal!
cswilson, I'm with you on early versus late feeding. Our late April/ May calvers are very cheap to feed in December on silage and straw allowing us to save enough banked grass for an early April turnout. Until we have enough grazing available for every day we don't have deep snow cover (1st April - ? December) I'm not worrying about growing swaths to feed them through the deep snow season.

[wd40]

A wise old (late) Alberta grassman told me years ago that a cow "walks on, lays on, and deficates on 2 1/2 time what she eats".
Probably not far off.

[kpb]

farmers_son, As grassfarmer pointed out I think you missed in my post that the $20 per ton in the pit includes everything--seeding, seed, fertilizer, spraying and silaging. It does not include land costs but I didn't figure that in because, if you are going to graze grass longer or swath graze you still need the land, right?

I could save the cost of silaging by swath grazing but, like grassfarmer, I like to feed some straw as well as silage and mix some mineral in too. My yardage costs are quite low since I mostly feed silage to the calves so the machinery is running anyway and the cows overwinter in a 90 acre field so there is no pen cleaning.

although the $160 per acre cost may seem high to you, farmers_son, I challenge you to work out what it would cost a farmer to produce an 8 ton per acre crop if he bought his own seed and fertilizer, cultivated and silaged himself. If you include the interest costs, fuel and depreciation on the machinery I think you may find it is above $20 per ton to grow and harvest this crop.

kpb

[PureCountry]

Just a note...my friend down the road is a real number-cruncher when it comes to his costs, and he split his depreciation of equipment over the different "sectors" of their operation. But even with doing that, his silage costs him $22 per ton.

I'm sure it has a bit to do with the fact that silage in the Hardisty area only averages 5-6 ton an acre, but those are the numbers anyway.

[grassfarmer]

wd40 "....walks on, lays on, and deficates on 2 1/2 time what she eats". - and so revolves the nutrient cycle!
A comment that I read from Don Campbell's holistic column in Cattleman's magazine comes to mind. He was saying that once you have grown grass it is impossible to waste it - this challenges the thinking of most producers who think of grass as something that grows seasonally and has to be harvested each season or it is wasted. Grass trampled into the ground, preferrably manured on as well creates the perfect conditions for a healthy pasture in future, adding litter and fertility. Don was saying we should look at the land as our bank - in years of good growth you can store this asset up for the future - to be drawn down in years of drought or poor grass growth. We should always look to grow as much grass as possible and only harvest as much as we need as $ (through selling our cattle) while we continue to build our "bank accounts".

[grassfarmer]

kpb, a thought struck me this afternoon relating to your earlier post where you say you produce 16,000lbs per acre wet, under a silage system and no-one in your area can equal that with grazing. That may be true but financially the grazing can be looked at in a different light.
If I can get 100 Auds per acre off pasture with no fertiliser that is probably 8000lbs of wet matter - half your silage yield. But excluding land costs as you did there is essentially no cash cost to this grass. So compare my 100 AUDd per acre at no cost to your 266? AUDs per acre produced by silage (60lbs a day fresh weight which is a conservative estimate I think?). So you are only really producing 166 AUDs per acre more than me and it is costing you $160 (8x$20) an acre to do so - close to that $1 a day figure again!
In fairness we have both excluded land costs and yours would be less per AUD as you are getting double the yield. On the other hand we are all tending to compare grazing pasture with cow/calf pairs to winter feeding a dry cow which has lower feed requirements.
Another way to look at it would be if I took the fertiliser you apply to get an 8 ton silage crop and apply it to intensively managed pasture how much grass would we get?
You obviously have a good system, I'm impressed that you can put silage in the pit for $20/ton all in.

[kpb]

grassfarmer, you know it's funny because I've been thinking lately that silage is too expensive to put up. There's a couple of interesting things about getting everything done on a custom basis. The first is that the costs have not gone up much in 10 years. Does that seem strange to you because it does to me. But I've got records that show the cost per ton 10 years ago was about $17.50, all in. Last year, with an admitedly excellent crop, the cost was just under $20 per ton. I have had the same guy do everything for every year of that 10 so I assume he's making something. I would have thought things would go up more than that over that time span but I've come to learn that if I count on $20 per ton in the pit, that will be darn close to what it is.

The second thing is this, you've got silage made, not on your land, in your pit for $25 a ton. That is a better deal than what I'm doing because you have no land costs. If we say that a quarter yields 1,280 tons at 8 tons per acre then your extra cost over mine is just over $6,000. But I've used my own land, which takes it out of doing something else (like grazing) plus I have to make land payments, taxes, etc. Your deal is a lot better than mine.

Which brings me back to what you've talked about a lot and I've been thinking about--if you can graze your cows a long time in the fall, then early in the spring and buy in the feed for the difference, that might be the lowest cost feed of all for the cow-calf guy. My problem is that I also feed calves. However the backgrounded calves over the winter have not been nearly as good as grassing calves, at least for me in the last few years. I wonder if the best thing to do would be to overwinter cows as cheap as possible, not feed calves over the cold winter months, then buy a whack of calves in the spring, put lots of grass pounds on them and finish them in the late fall. That way you avoid feeding hard in the worst weather months of the year and most of the weight gain comes on the grass.

kpb