New Study Reveals Crossbreeding Advantages

Crossbreeding Pays
Most of you Beef readers will be shocked to learn the results of a new study funded by the Herford Association that shows an economic advantage to crossbreeding. And why are we still spending money on this? We've landed on the moon!!!!!!

Letter from a reader

When I started this blog I really didn't think anyone would read it and I really didn't care...it was a way for me to keep track of things we'd done at the ranch and a nice visual and written history of our successes and failures along the way. I wanted to look back on it to learn what had worked and what hadn't. But I've been amazed how many emails I get from people that have stumbled onto it and are wanting to learn more about mob grazing. I'm so happy that this blog can be a benefit to those who wish to read it...it never crossed my mind that so many people would want to discuss mob grazing with me! Since I haven't been posting much I decided to post an email I got recently and my response. Hope your winter has been as nice as ours!

Nathan,
I was wondering if you came to any conclusions on your problem with scours. Sounds like you are moving to an all stocker operation so I wasn't sure if you would be discussing the scours problem any more so I decided to email. Do you think it had anything to do with your higher utilization rate? I read that you were trying to eat more to control the brush and thought maybe that had an ill effect on the calving situation. After reading alot of what Greg Judy is doing, sounds like he had quite a train wreck while focusing on landscape. Sounds like things improved after he went to focusing on cow performance, especially last 90 days before calving. His target now is 30% graze and 70% trample, if I understand him correctly. I was also wondering if there was a relationship between the bcs of cows with problem calves and those that had calves without scours. I do not have near the numbers that you have, but have noticed that some of the cows just haven't adapted to the low inputs and mob grazing well. I had a lot of pinkeye this fall and it didn't matter the condition of the cow, as some would suggest. I also have read that bcs at breedbac time can have an influence, and, if that is the case, alot of my cows were on a downhill slide during the rough winter weather that we experienced last year here in northwest Missouri. I turned the bull in Dec. 1 and the weather really was bad from Christmas day on. Maybe there is some truth to that theory?? and the cause for my pinkeye.
Last year was my first trial run with the mob grazing with mixed results. I sure didn't do it well enough to have near enough stockpile. Ragweed was terrible, and i was not sure if it was the perfect ragweed year or my grazing practice that caused it. I definately did not want to sound like I knew a lot about the mob grazing, quite the contrary. Reading your blog is great and I just was hoping there you had found some answers so some of us following in your footsteps don't have the same problems. Thanks for reading and I hope you carry on with your blog and wish you luck with your stockers.
KR

Hey K,

Thanks so much for the kind email. There is no doubt that last winter had a negative effect on the cows. It was the toughest winter we’ve had here in recent memory. That said, I thought the cows were in pretty good condition going into calving season..I would say they were 4-6’s with the 4’s being the older cows. I think by far the most important thing in preventing scours is bcs at time of calving and I really think ours was adequate…certainly not bad enough to see the kind of train wreck we had. At the end of the day, I think it was a combination of a lot of things with the 2 primary culprits being 1. The stress on the calf when it got left by its mother during a move and 2. The introduction of some purchased bred heifers/pairs a few weeks before we started calving. We can solve for problem number 2 by not introducing any outside animals that close to calving, but I have no idea how to solve for problem #1…we tried about everything this year with little success.

Mob grazing will definitely separate the weak…our weak cows just fell over dead…I’m a little embarrassed to say that, but it happened. We had a few cows that really didn’t look that poor that just gave up…we blamed some of that on the origin of the cows (Wyoming/SD) and the fact that they are relatively straight bred angus, but the mob grazing certainly hastened things. The interesting thing was that we had more grass this past 12 months than we’ve ever had. The cattle were never hungry. I think the strong cattle simply got the best groceries, the weak got enough to eat, but it wasn’t the most nutritious. I’m very comfortable with the way we graze a pasture, which is probably around 60-70% utilization, 30-40% trompage. Not saying Greg is wrong, we just do it differently. I don’t worry much about ragweed…there’s always a time of year during the mob grazing season that hits that ragweed just right and it goes crazy. It doesn’t bother me a bit, our cattle graze it all down the next time thru. I don’t see weeds, I see forage.

To conclude, keep tinkering with your mob grazing until you get to a situation that works for you. Everyone has different challenges and different goals. And while I am moving to stockers next year, I still believe a person can mob graze a cow herd, it’s just a hell of a lot harder than mob grazing stockers. Two years ago I could move 800 head of stockers in 6 minutes. I would spend 15-30 minutes building fence and 5-10 minutes moving stockers and I would go eat breakfast at 7:00 am wondering what the hell I was going to do the rest of the day. With the cows, my ranch manager and I worked some days from sun up to sun down chasing sick calves and trying to get the cow herd in one bunch for most of the calving season….I still have nightmares. And I think stockers do a much better job of “mob grazing” than the cows do. So my mind is pretty well made up. There’s not much to report on the blog during the winter…we should have more than enough stockpile to get us thru the winter which means another winter of feeding ZERO bales of hay. It’s nice to say that knowing we are running over 50% more cows this year than we were 3 years ago.

Thanks again for the email,

Nathan

Record calf prices

I will continue to suggest that you refrain from complaining about the high price of corn. Clearly the price of corn and the price of beef are not necessarily negatively correlated. As I have stated in the past, if you would consider yourselves grass farmers instead of cattlemen, you would love to see corn prices rise. Do you think wheat growers complain about high priced corn? Soybean growers? So why would grass growers complain? The fact is, although not as closely related as wheat or beans, grass is definitely a complimentary product to corn....so that as the price of corn rises, the VALUE of grass rises as well. If grass traded on the CBOT, you can bet your last dollar that you would see the same recent rise in it's value as we have in corn, wheat and beans...it would track very closely to grain commodities. This is not to say that there would not be occasional disparities or spikes/shocks for various reasons....I am making a "general" statement. All too often, beef publications are ignorant to macro-economics and instead focus on short term issues like: well if corn prices rise by 10 cents today, it will cost me more to feed this calf to slaughter. While that statement may be true, it ignores the greater market forces that drive up the value of the grass that cattlemen are producing which in turn drives up the revenue the grass farm generates (assuming the quantity of grass harvested remains constant). So ignore what the pundits are telling you about the dangers of high priced corn. Celebrate our government's supporting of the ethanol industry and be happy for farmers that will be putting more money into their pockets this year and in years to come, because you are right behind them!

If you rent grass, think about locking in a long term lease

I know I'm getting away from my mob grazing posts, but it's kinda boring right now at the ranch (thank God)...nothing is dying, no scours to report on, life is pretty good. So I thought I would try to share some of my thoughts on other ranching related issues. I really enjoy following the price of corn. Beef producers love to complain about ethanol subsidies and the related high price of corn. But the truth is that higher grain prices makes your grass much more valuable, and that what we really are, grass farmers. For that reason, if you believe that high corn prices are here to stay (which I do), now is the time to lock in your leases long term...I will not sign a lease less than 7 years long. First, I can't afford to make the necessary improvements usually needed only to be gone the next year, and secondly, just like farm rents must go up with corn, grass rents will follow. Locking in your lease rates now will save you lots of $$$$ in the future and will allow you to make decisions to improve your place that you can't make with short term leases.

Don't complain about high corn prices

Despite what you might read in Drovers or Beef, high corn prices are actually good for the cattle industry for a number of reasons. First, our two big competitors (chicken and pork) are much more reliant on corn for gain than we are...true they are more efficient gainers, but unlike cattle, they can't substitute grass gain for grain gain. And that's the key. Stop thinking about yourself as a beef producer and start thinking of yourself as a grass producer...the cattle are simply your combine. Since grass can be a direct substitute for grain, the higher the price of grain, the higher the value of grass...it's really as simple as that. I love high corn prices. I hope corn goes to $8 and stays there. Cow/calf producers will see some downward pressure on calf prices, but it will be temporary...as the price of competing meats goes higher, the value of beef will go higher, that will bring calf prices back up. For grass stocker operators, high corn is a beautiful thing. If feedlots cost of gain is $1, they will be willing to pay something close to that $1 for grass/forage gain. The future looks bright.

Moving to Stockers

Well we are getting close to making a decision on how we want to go forward with our operation and we are leaning heavily toward going to stockers. The problems that we had this past calving season (calving while mob grazing) coupled with the recent spike in corn prices (I think high corn is here to stay, for a number of reasons) makes the decision to move to stockers relatively easy. I love cows and will miss calving season, but I won't miss the mental stress of trying to calve while mob grazing or the heartbreak of losing calf afer calf from scours. So we will be liquidating our entire cow herd next spring (probably in March)...they're a hell of a good set of cows and I hate to have to do this but I think it's the right thing to do. The plan is to then rest our grass, stockpile as much forage as possible, and purchase 2000-3000 head of stockers in December, mob graze them until June, supplementing them with about 3# of ddg and hoping for 1.6# per day gain. My biggest challenge is sourcing and merchandising our stockers, but I'm going to start working the phones.

Early weaned calf weights

We weighed all of the calves that we early weaned today. 172 head of calves averaged 328 lbs. We moved all 172 head to Mickeys where there is knee deep forage...it hasn't been grazed all year. We will be supplementing 1 lb/cwt of ddg per head per day. To make things work easier, we plan on rotating the calves every 3 days and feeding them every 3 days in bunks. I hope we can weigh these calves out in March and will post the results.