Grass Gains

[PureCountry]

Cswilson, wooly, grassfarmer or whoever....what kind of gains have you gotten in the past when kicking calves out on grass? With these June/July born calves (if we'd kept them), they'd hit grass mid-May weighing 800lbs or better. With spending the winter on swaths and bale-grazing along side the cows, I was thinking they should gain 2.5-3lbs easily. I've heard guys say they did better, but what do you think?

[grassfarmer]

Summer gains depend on winter gains to a fair extent. If you winter calves tough they can make spectacular gains through compensatory gain whereas cattle fed better over winter will gain less at grass. On our grass fed beefs we are weaning @500lb on 1st October so want to achieve @700lbs gain over the next 12 months to slaughter. I think that a steady gain achieves a quality of beef that boom/bust growth patterns can't so we aim for 1.8 lb gain over the winter and we find we can get about 2.6lb gain on highly intensive, highly managed seeded pasture with legumes. I don't doubt a person could get higher gains with less management/ poorer grass if the cattle hit the grass lean enough. It just depends what you want to do with the cattle.

[cswilson]

If your calves are weighing 800 going to grass as short yearlings I'd think 1.5-2.0 lb/day would be more realistic-I imagine without seeing the cattle they've got a fair amount of condition on them. We had bulls do over 4.0 at Dylan Biggs grass test but they were pretty lean and mean going out. If I were you I'd budget for 2.0 and hope for more-once a yearling gets over 900 you don''t get paid veryt well for the extra weight-I've seen 9 weight steers dollar out better than 1,000'ers.

[cowman]

Now I'm not sure exactly where you live Purecountry, but some of that old "hard grass" country can pack on the pounds, better than some of this "washy" tame grass? Some of that old "prairie wool" makes them pack on the beef like a feedlot!...just my opinion.

[blackjack]

...we have grassed yearlings for many years ...when we are grassing open heifers they usually come back gaining 1.5 - 1.3/4 avg ... the steers pretty well avg 2 lbs a year in year out...

[PureCountry]

Their condition when hitting grass would depend alot on how we got them through the winter once they're weaned in the first part of February. If they went on their own swath-grazing or bale-grazing paddocks, I think they'd hit pasture a little green. But who knows? They gained alot better than I expected as it was just being on the cows on bales and swaths. So, it's tough to guess what they'd do.