Hey there Mr. Wilson. I noticed a bit of a post the other day where you talked briefly of your bale grazing technique. I wonder if you could share a bit more of that with us. I met a fellow at a grazing seminar who uses bale grazing to custom feed cattle and is showing a fair return on his investment. I plan to move toward more bale grazing next winter and would like any suggestions from anyone and their experience.
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Well take a trip to Campbell's they are doing it on a bit larger scale than me. Basically we put a 5-10 days feed in each of our summer paddocks and move the cattle when it is CLEANED up. The biggest bunch is a little over 400 cows and calves and are costing about $200 a day to feed. The cattle are licking snow and are looking good-haven't treated a calf yet. You can get a fair amount of pasture land manured in the course of a winter. We usually start placing bales for winter as soon as we rotate through a pasture for the last time in the fall. There's pics on ranchers.net under 'Bale Grazing Revisited'. Some guys harrow where they've fed the next spring but it isn't an essential. You can move fence in winter from bale row to bale row but that's too much work for me-we've got enough fields to just use our regular paddocks. Master Kaiser do you ever lease out Welsh Black bulls? I can see 2007 is going to be a kinder more polite year as far as we two are concerned lol.
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Not enough small paddocks here yet, so the plan is to use electric fence and move every few days. Steve Kenyon talked of rods inserted into the next days feed so you don't need to pound posts into the frozen ground.
Sorry Prince Wilson, I don't lease anymore. Have helped out a few customers with a yearling if they are in a bind, but much prefer to sell all of our bulls - even if I run out of buyers and have to let em go too cheap at our sale.
All the best to you coppertop - but I can't guarantee peace and harmony every day. Sometimes when my brain talks to my fingers, my mind gets in the way. One example of this may be the result of an old coot from Montana talking about infecting the pure American cow herd with Canadian leper cows???????
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if you're worried about restricting access and don't have small cells it looks to me like the big square bales are a solution. if the cows have anything to eat i think they'd give up trying to rub the big squares open. we're trying some now and it seems to be the case. no cross wires needed and you could spread a whole winter's feed in one pasture. one of our neighbour's does the same with round bales and says the cows noses get raw from rubbing so they'd rather pick if there's something available especially in cold weather.
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Thanks don, I could see the big twines on those large square bales being much harder to manipulate than round bale twine. Just lay them on edge so they are easier to cut in the winter I suppose. May have to find some kind of self unloading big square hauler as my little 50 horse Kubota is all I plan to have on this farm for a long long time.
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Ohh I just cut a few more bales open every day or if I can coerce the kids into helping I take them all o0ff before hand. We put out a 7-10 days feed per spot so that spreads the cows out pretty good. the feeding spots are a bit cramped right now because there was soo much snow to plow.
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They had a little blurb in the last western producer about the benifits of bale grazing/feeding in the field versus feeding in a yard and hauling manure out?
For overall grass production, feeding with a hay processor in the field, was the top producer, actually by a fair bit? However they never printed how much that cost over the bale grazing method. It would be interesting if they had done an actual cost benifit?
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They also mentioned the bale processor lost the most leaves-when they tested it at Termundae Farms the bale processor fed cows gained quite a bit less also. Bale Processors do make happy dust though and burn up diesel. We tried them here at different times didn't see any benefit to our operation-mind you I hate iron.
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