Monday, April 5, 2010

Calving While Mob Grazing

As we head into our calving season beginning April 21st, I am struggling to determine how best to calve them out. Last year we had disastrous results attempting to calve while keeping the mob together. We lost around 8% of our calves to scours. It was a cool, wet year and that could have contributed to our scour problem but I am frustrated that there is nothing available online that addresses the issue of calving while mob grazing. Nothing. Zero. I will continue to post my experiences as we begin calving.

I have spoken to some of the proponents of mob grazing and they say "spread the cows out while calving"...well that's great and all but the key time for me to be mob grazing is during spring. It's when we can get the most benefit from eating the weeds and brush and knocking back the fescue. I'm hoping we can figure out a way to make this work.

1 comment:

  1. nathan,

    how old were the calves that were getting scours? were they at the beginning of the calving period, middle, or end?

    chad peterson

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