Observations

I have made several observations the past few weeks while walking thru the Goat Ranch. We fertilized with one ton of chicken litter over about 1200 acres late last fall. We didn't get any rain on it at all so got no grass growth last year. A few of our pasures look better than they ever have. The North Rock Barn pasture and the Rock Barn pasture have more grass this year than they've ever had. The Cabin pasture and the South Center have decent grass but have been better. The Stocker pasture (was grazed late and hard and didn't get any litter) looks worse than it has in a few years. The stocker pasture has been mob grazed more than any pasture on the ranch and it's had grass so heavy you could barely walk thru it, but this year it's just not that great. My disappointment is that it appears that a person will need to mob graze continuously to get results each year...you can't quit mob grazing for a year and still have great grass. I also haven't seen much earth worm activity or castings. I am wondering if the severe drought may have hurt their population a bit. Looking back, I forgot how dry it got at the ranch and I'm thrilled that we didn't have to feed cows last winter. I should probably be very happy with the way the pastures look, but I'm not. I'm anxious to get our mob grazing program started back up! I think these young, thin open cows could be an ideal candidate to put into a mob and graze. We are just getting going, but already we see the cows stripping the oak sprouts bare and devouring the blackberry sprouts. I went back to areas where I knew we had big thickets of blackberrys and there are only a handful of young tender sprouts that I know will get eaten when we graze those areas. I'm starting to get excited and will keep you posted as to our results. I promise I will have some pictures in the very near future to share.

First Post of the New Season

I will keep this post relatively short. I will be posting much more often in the coming weeks/months as we start mob grazing a large group of thin open cows that we are in the process of purchasing. Spring arrived about a month early this year. After last years drought, the cheat has just exploded this spring. Our pastures are lush with cheat and hop clover...it's just been perfect conditions for those plants to flourish. We've done a small amount of spraying for musk thistle and will likely need to do more next year...it appears to have survived the drought very well. I'm disappointed in the fescue. What remains is doing well but it appears that we may have lost some plant density in the drought. I will be anxious to see what our pastures look like when the cheat and hop clover go away. This years plan is to calve out our cows at the goat ranch (they should start calving in a week or so) using a 3 day rotation. There should be enough grass east of the creek to hold them thru calving when we will move them to Mickeys. The thin cows we are buying will be mob grazed west of the creek. We hope to put together 400-500 head. Our plan is to run bull with them, put some weight on them, and sell them in August. The longer term plan is to have the Goat Ranch empty come September, stockpile grass and run stockers Jan-July.

$1 Value of Gain

From a recent article: (link)

"For those operations able to retain cows, the price of calves should be at levels significantly higher than in early 2011 when 400- to 500-pound steer calves sold for $170 per cwt. For stocker operations, the price relationship between calf value and feeder value should still allow for value of gain to exceed $1 per pound with price opportunities much higher than that when markets fluctuate. The challenge will be to maintain production costs so that profits can be attained."

2011 Stockers Sold

On October 3, 2011 we sold the stockers that we purchased in May/June thru the Joplin Stockyards. If you recall we purchased 170 head on May 23 and 40 head on June 6...we took all of them to Mickeys and rotationally grazed them (we moved them every 3 or so days) thru some pretty decent grass. Obviously it was very hot and dry, but here are the results: avg weight in - 510 lbs, avg weight out - 575 lbs. The calves gained 14,435 lbs in 26,570 days for an average daily gain of .54 lbs. We lost 4 head that we know of (NOT GOOD), we sold 200, so there are 6 head still at Mickeys that we couldn't get out of the woods. We hope to get them rounded up and sold soon. We made money on these calves but only thru the dumb luck of selling them for a higher price per pound than we bought them for...if we could somehow figure out how to do this consistently, I think we've got a shot at making this stocker thing work.

2010 Calf Crop Sold...

On October 3, 2011 we sold our 2010 calf crop thru the Joplin Stockyards. We sold 353 head of source and age verified B2B calves (we actually sold 365 but 12 were my dad's), a handful came from Sullingers but those are offset by the handful that we didn't get to Joplin because they were left at the Goat Ranch on the neighbors. We will hopefully catch them soon and get them merchandised. Anyway, to keep things simple, let's just agree that we had 353 calves weaned off of the Goat Ranch this year. Those calves included all of the calves that we purchased on the Arkansas heifers and all of the calves that we early weaned and moved to Mickeys for several months. If you recall, those 353 calves were weaned from just over 600 head of bred cows/heifers, an absolutely horrible wean percentage. Scours killed over 200 head of calves in 2010 (you can read all about it in earlier blog posts). The 353 head we sold weighed an average of 568 lbs, brought $1.385 per pound for a total gross of $277,698. After hauling and selling expenses they netted $266,155 for an average net of $753.98 per head. I think it's pretty incredible to be able to gross $277K from around 1500 acres (several hundred acres of that is woods)....while at the same time it's pretty sad to think that the 200 head of calves that died from scours would have meant an extra $150,000 in my pocket. To think we could have earned this type of money from a measly 1500 acres is just astounding...we still did pretty damn good. Had we not tried to mob graze, we would have likely had only 350-400 head of cows and so would have weaned off a very similar number of calves. All in all, this has been a pretty good year. If you aren't lining your pockets in this market, you need to find something else to do.

Our calves likely had an average birth date of May 15th, 2010. So the calves were 16.5 months old when we sold them and weighed 568 lbs. That's just embarrassing. Yeah it was crazy hot and they didn't have the best forage thru the summer but holy crap that's bad. I'm excited to get back to mob grazing some stockers. Don't worry, there will still be plenty of stuff that I will post that will make you all feel very good about your own operations.

Dry, Dry, Dry

Conditions at the ranch are much worse than I had imagined. I hadn't been down in several months and although I knew it was dry, I had no idea how bad it actually was. The ponds are lower than I have ever seen them and like my manager said, "you should have seen them before the 4" rain." That 4" rain is the only appreciable rain we've had in months, and it just wasn't enough to really effect much. While the grass is green, it's very deceptive. A closer look shows large areas of dead grass with nothing growing. I have to admit that I feel incredibly lucky that we decided to sell all of the cows off of that ranch earlier this year. We sold the stockers on Monday, so now there is only a handful of heifers left at the ranch and they will be moved to Mickey's soon. We will leave the ranch empty until we feel it's ready to support some stockers...we had hoped that would be February, but I don't see any way we are going to be able to grow any appreciable amount of stockpiled forage to allow for grazing before spring green up. This is very disappointing but I guess it could be much worse. We're not nearly as dry as Texas/Oklahoma...but we're getting there.

Rain...finally

I've been disappointed that we haven't gotten the litter spread by now, but it wouldn't have mattered. We haven't had a (decent) rain since July...there was nothing green in the pastures and nothing actively growing. Well that all changed this past weekend as we got 4 inches in a 2 day period. They were supposed to start spreading today, so even though we didn't get it on early like we hoped, it might have been for the best. I'm hopeful that we can get some great growing weather over the next 30 days.