It has been a great year for us at Triple Creek Ranch! Our farm is located due north of the Raleigh-Durham area right on the Virginia border. This area is known for long summer dry spells, but this summer we have been blessed with timely rains that have really made things grow. We have been using controlled grazing management for a long time now, and the magical things that happen in old pasture systems are visible everywhere on the farm. It has been a fun summer for me at work as well, as we are just coming off a series of 8 Amazing Grazing workshops that featured our plant collection, dung beetles, and temporary electric fence. The dung beetles are abundant at Triple Creek this summer and it has been fun showing them off.
Our planning and hard work has paid off this summer in the way of good grazing on plantings of Quick-n-Big Crabgrass, Ray’s Crazy Mix, Sudangrass, and Sudangrass with Cowpeas. Each of these forages provides it’s own challenges, but all have produced a lot of very high quality forage at a low cost. Our biggest problem at this point is keeping up with all the good feed.
Forage availability and quality have been high on our permanent pastures, and the highly diverse plant mix really showed a lot of red clover this year, which helped offset our fescue toxicosis problem. Put that together with all the Dallisgrass and other summer grasses that are dominating right now and only the most sensitive of the cows still show fescue toxicosis symptoms. At this time of year it is easy to forget how much these cows suffered during May.
We weaned calves from the main cow herd today in a pasture with four strands of polywire between them and their moms. This is the third year we have done this. The first year we had no problems at all. The second year we had three significant breakouts that required some resorting. Either way it was a lot better than hauling them to the pen and dealing with the mud. Today the high quality crabgrass kept them all with their heads down grazing immediately after we separated them from the cows. We are very late weaning again this year, but the cows are in great body condition and you can really tell the difference in performance of the cows by looking at their calves. We plan to cull deep at the end of the summer, and the information on these calves will help us make difficult decisions.
We are excited about our first-calf heifers that are due to calve the first of October. We have been synchronizing and breeding heifers AI now for 5 years. This has been challenging but rewarding. One of my concerns was I still needed a clean-up bull even though we were only breeding 25 heifers (leaving only 10-12 for the bull). This year for the first time we only bred them AI, so they all are due on the same day! The ones that didn’t settle are doing very well in the finishing program.
We have been finishing cattle now for many years, with the finishers being a big focus for the last 10 years. We sell our beef to an integrator that allows the use of limited supplementation but encourages the use of as much forage as possible. We usually start feeding these pasture-finished cattle about 100 days before their scheduled delivery date to achieve the level of fat the customer wants. The feeding became really expensive the last few years with dramatic increases in feed cost and marginal forage years. This year we have been doing our best to keep the finishers on the best quality forage available and it is paying off. We are coming up on 55 days to delivery date and only now have started some limited feeding, and the cattle are in the fattest condition they have been in at this date ever.
Finally, the most exciting thing is that we are poised to plant Novel Endophyte Tall Fescue on 30 acres we have had in annuals for the last 8 years. All the pieces came together this year including getting the smother crops planted on time, getting soil samples taken, and doing weed control to take care of horsenettle and other problem weeds.
Our plan is to plant different fields to BarOptima plus E34, Martin2 Protek, Jesup MaxQ II and Estancia. One field will be planted to a mix of all 4, and a final field will be a complex mix including Novel Endophyte Tall Fescue and other cool season perennials. It will be exciting the see all these options grow and develop while we kill more old stands of toxic tall fescue to grow the annuals that have become important for our finished beef program. As we replace more and more of our toxic fescue we hope to eventually get away from the annuals and focus on high quality non-toxic perennials.
There is never a dull moment when you are a farmer! I love to see the annual cycles of life and how our efforts pay off. If high feed and fertilizer prices have you considering upgrading your forage program make your plans and follow through. Good things are bound to happen!
~ Matt Poore, NC State
The Alliance for Grassland Renewal is a national organization focused on enhancing the appropriate adoption of novel endophyte tall fescue technology through education, incentives, self-regulation and promotion. For more resources or to learn more about the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, go to www.grasslandrenewal.org
The Alliance for Grassland Renewal 