Forage Chains Connect the Dots for Profit By Dan Glenn

When our cool, normally wet winters give way to spring, the cows start to swell with both the winter annuals we planted and the lush smorgasbord of seasonal annuals and rebirth of perennials in our wild swards. Nothing like green grass to make a cow’s coat shine and her belly balloon with her factory churning out meat and milk from what is in essence a recipe of sunlight, soil, and water. Spring forages and the accompanying compensatory gain coming off hay season combine to be a great time to grow our calf crop. 

One key to any successful grazing operation is relying on the cow to harvest her own high quality groceries without much help. Having a firm understanding of your operation’s forage resources on a yearly basis can help make profitable management decisions such as when to calve, when to wean, and when to market the calf crop. Knowing where the forage surpluses are and how we can take advantage of them is key, while also managing the deficit times as efficiently as possible. We can’t ignore the seasonal marketing swings of calf and cull prices, but to be profitable we must build our grazing program around our on-farm resources. 

Since we have dedicated farm land that we double crop with winter annuals, January through May is the strength of our grazing program. 

Consequently, here in South Georgia we calve in the mild winter months of February and March. This allows our top forage quality to match the nutritional needs of our cow herd, which peaks around two months after calving, and starts a slow slide until weaning, after which her requirements drop precipitously. This hard fall couldn’t come at a better time: Fall, when our perennial grasses are losing their luster. 

Because of our overlapping row crop operation, we are most busy during peanut harvest in October and November, also a time when we are attempting to plant winter annuals. Usually there are neither enough employees or hours in the week to get everything done on time, so weaning is not a duty we add to this list. Because we wean, vaccinate, and background our calves, we simply don’t have the time or manpower to add this to the pertinent pile. Instead, we have kept calves on their dams and pushed back weaning until late November or early December. Unfortunately, at that time mom isn’t making much milk as she enters her final trimester, and the stockpiled perennial grasses are the poorest quality of the year.

Last year we tried something new. Forgoing the benefits of a late weaning where the calves continue to learn grazing behavior from their dams, we weaned “early.” Early for us was still around seven to eight months old, in September. Instead of a small amount of milk and low energy and protein grasses, we pulled mom’s milk altogether and ran the calves on stockpiled summer annuals, consisting of sorghum Sudan, sunn hemp, cowpea, pearl millet, and crabgrass. This was either a second or third graze of those crops, but based on manure reading, gut fill, and growth observation, the nutrition was adequate, and much better than prior years when we didn’t wean early. Not only did the calves perform better, but mom recovered and went into winter and the calving season a full BCS score higher.

Moving the calves off mom also allowed us to stockpile Bermudagrass and have our dry cows graze it during the fall. We tried this earlier with them as pairs and both calf and dam did not hold condition, as both the protein and energy levels weren’t adequate. With the cows dry, the stockpile held the dams’ condition much better than before, and we were able to delay feeding hay another couple months. 

The other thing that went well was we got our winter annuals planted on time so that those calves were able to transition to spring oats, hybrid turnip, cereal rye, and spring pea by early December, and then later to the full prescription of annuals adding crim son clover, hairy vetch, ryegrass, oats, and triticale. Our calves struggle to gain weight on our medium quality hay without a supplement, and as we move our steers into a value added grassfed beef program, we are extremely limited with what we can offer outside of fresh and stored forages. 

Our growing season might look severely different than yours. Our first freeze typically doesn’t visit until November, and our lowest temperatures of the year are often in the mid 20s, and almost never in the single digits. Before you think you want to move here, just remember that from May to September, we hover in the high 80s and 90s with heat indexes piercing triple digits on a regular basis. The humidity is like a blanket that tries to smother us at night, with actual air temperatures rarely retreating below the mid 70s and often in the 80s. Our British cattle (Angus, Red Angus, and Hereford) typically hide in the shade or water during the heat of the day and change their grazing times. We’ve been impressed with our heat adapted composites (Senepol x Angus and Beefmaster x Angus) ability to withstand the temperatures more effectively, often grazing longer into the heat or ignoring it and resting in the sun. 

Backing up the calving season also allowed us to pregnancy check our cows a little earlier and sell our culls before the fall run as cull prices were pulled lower on volume. Those older calves were also able to graze the summer annual stockpiles more effectively with more rumen development. 

One of the most important advantages of backing up our calving season was that most of our calves were born before the black vultures returned to our area in late winter. Over the past decade we’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars on black vultures predating on newborn calves. NO deterrent program has been effective. This year we only lost two calves. While still an economic hit, much better than prior years. We will keep those calves coming in January and February moving forward to get ahead of the migration. 

As you can see from our program, matching forage resources with our grazing season can be an effective tool to fight costs. We likely added 30-60 lbs of weaning weight by utilizing stockpiled summer annuals and transitioning sooner to winter annuals. In today’s market that adds up to real money. While stockpiled annuals are an expense, we gather a premium for our grassfed protocol and keep those calves gaining during the worst quality grazing of the year. Each ranch and grazing program will be different, but recognizing your weak link and employing a better program is the key to keep the cows and calves grazing and growing.

Dan Glenn is a cattle breeder and soil cowboy from southern Georgia. He raises environmentally adapted cattle in a low input system. You can find out more about him and his farm at www.deepgrassgraziers.com. He can be reached at dan@deepgrassgraziers. com, or (229)457-1136