December 2023
There is an extension program in Virginia and other states called “300 Days Grazing” which encourages farmers to extend their grazing season such that they only need to feed harvested forage for two months. A traditional system in our area would require hay feeding for at least 120 days if not longer. There are several strategies a farmer can use to extend the grazing season, both by grazing later into winter using stockpiled forage, and getting started earlier in the spring. Sometimes farms are overstocked such that they need to reduce their herd size in order to get to 300 days of grazing.
At Triple Creek we have used various methods to extend the grazing season for about 20 years, and we achieved that 300 days goal regularly until the last few years. Generally we did 30 days of our hay feeding in the fall, while letting the tall fescue stockpile. Recently, we have struggled to achieve our goal, and have actually been grazing the mature cow herd for more like 250 to 270 days. This has occurred for a variety of reasons. One is reduction in our fall forage production due to warm season grasses invading old stands of tall fescue. This trend is due to winter tredding damage that has occurred over the last 5 very wet winters. Another is that our cow size has increased…they are still small by comparison to many other herds, but mature cows size has increased about 100 lbs in the last decade. Another reason is that due to the high cost of fertilizer we don’t put out as much, depending on our natural nutrient cycling instead. This works well in an old pasture system like ours when it is warm and wet, but when it is cold and/or dry the biological activity slows and so does the nutrient supply, limiting our growth.
One action we made this year to reduce our forage demand was to sell a significant number of cows. We reduced our cow herd size by 18% in late summer (20 cows). We sold some older cows as well as the cows that were the least productive in recent years. This brought us a good income that we invested in planting novel endophyte tall fescue pastures, and the herd we have left is much younger and of better quality. We have also had enough rain this fall to stimulate a substantial stockpile on most of the pastures. At this point we estimate that we have about 45 days of grazing left, which will put us at 300 days for the year!
We were excited to have our final calf born last week. We had a very successful calving season lasting 55 days with only two lost out of 89 born. We also only had one case of agalactia in an older cow. Her calf was puny at 5 days of age, and he turned out to be pretty hungry. We fed him for a week or so and the cow finally started to get a little milk so that we couldn’t get him to take a bottle any more. At this point he will live but will never make much of a calf.
We do many things to manage around fescue toxicosis, and it can turn out well like it did this year. However, we need to remember the major problems we had in the past with fescue toxicosis before the fescue stands died out so much. The weak link in our system is toxic fescue and we need to keep that in mind this time of year when it seems to be a distant problem.
We have started setting up our heifers to breed AI again this year. Like last year we will not use a cleanup bull, but rather will take what we get AI, and the ones that don’t catch will go to the beef program. This resulted in us finishing some pretty nice heifers this year, but with finishers bringing more than a bred heifer it is working for us. The breeding date will be January 3, so next month I will tell you how we got along. The heifers have been eating good quality hay with a little bit of feed supplement to grow them at a moderate rate so they are in good condition for breeding. After breeding they will bale graze for about 60 days until ryegrass and oats are ready to graze. These heifers will stay off toxic tall fescue for the rest of the grazing season, allowing us to develop them without any supplemental feed.
We also bought our whole cottonseed this month. We learned a long time ago that about 3 to 5 lbs per day (depending on forage quality) makes a wonderful supplement for fall calving brood cows. Whole cottonseed has great feeding value with about 23% crude protein and 90% TDN. It stimulates milk production and improves cow condition as well or better than much more expensive self-fed supplements. It is also easy to feed off sod or placed on unrolled hay. All feeds are very expensive at this time, and this cottonseed at $267 a ton is well worth the price.
Another December activity we do every year is doing a Breeding Soundness Exam on our bulls. This “Vet Day” is also the one scheduled day a year we have the Veterinarian on the farm for a visit. This allows us to maintain our Veterinarian-Client relationship so we can get prescription drugs in case we have a disease outbreak. As you know over the counter antibiotics of all kinds are gone from store shelves, and even to get long-acting tetracycline is prescription. This our go to drug for Pink Eye and Foot Rot, so keeping that relationship with our Veterinarian is critical to animal well being on our farm.
Finally, our stands of Novel Endophyte gradually are looking better and better. Most of the seed from our late October plantings germinated quickly because we planted into moisture. Unfortunately it went 4 weeks without substantial rainfall so many of those seedlings suffered. At this point our moisture status is good, and most of those seedlings are still alive. There also are newly emerging seedlings that from seed that did not initially germinate.
One field that we planted to BarOptima Plus E34 had been tilled, and therefore was bone dry when we got around to planting it. We deferred planting until November 15 as the Alliance for Grassland Renewal recommended when dealing with dry conditions. We had a good rain on November 23, and conditions have been moist ever since. These seedlings started emerging the first week of December, and at this point this looks to be our healthiest and most uniform stand. Time will tell about the survival of this stand compared to the others, but at least we will learn something!
I hope everyone has a good Holiday Season! We will be on the farm this year, and I look forward to those clear frosty mornings that feel nippy to me, but that the cattle absolutely love. Take time to give thanks for all we have and the opportunity we have to be outside enjoying nature.
~ Matt Poore, NC State and Chair of the Alliance for Grassland Renewal
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 